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Jason Perry
Expository Writing
Mrs. Schukman
October 14, 1999
The Narrative Essay
I stared at the blinking cursor, unbelieving at what I had just done. I was indeed done; done with a paper I agonized over for 6 hours. The paper was due in a scant 4 hours and I had all week to do it. The radio had stopped working because my brother got on the Internet and thus cut off my connection. That was the least of my problems working on this paper. I got it done, though. My life changed with one trip of a teacher to the chalkboard and one phrase, narrative essay. God, I hate narrative essays.
My day was going well. I devoured a big breakfast, my brother, for once, got out of the shower quick, and no major assignment was pending. Life was very, very good. Then life began to fall into oblivion. I saw on the board in the front of Mrs. Schukman’s room the journal entry for the day. It was about what would I write about in a narrative essay. Hope faded away. Somewhere on the planet a nuclear bomb went. An earthquake struck in some unknown place on the Earth. A volcano erupted on Jupiter’s moon Io and killed a bunch of Ionians. Somebody’s red rose just wilted and the petals fell onto the ground. The end of the world was indeed upon us. My jaw dropped and warning bells went off in my head. I went completely and utterly blank. I tried as hard as I could to write my journal. Channel One came on and talked about a nuclear bomb going off in India that caused an earthquake that somehow caused a volcano to erupt on Io (that killed a bunch of aliens). My jaw dropped once again. It was now the floor. As I was finishing my journal, Mrs. Schukman went to the front of the room and talked about, du du du, narrative papers. She gave us a cold, white study guide that gave me no hope for survival. She then gave us another evil sheet of paper that described itself as a Narrative Worksheet. It was then that I knew I was in a nightmare and I was going to wake up and all of this would never have happened. I was convinced that this was true. Then Katie pinched me and told me to stop babbling. Maybe I dreamed that one up; I have no idea anymore. Mrs. Schukman then described the worksheet in detail. We had to come up with a topic sentence, and then three details that support your topic sentence. And to top that all off we had to choose perspective. She showed us the choices in the Writing book, but I was still drawing blanks. If it is a personal narrative essay, what other perspectives could there possibly be other than First person. So I of course chose First Person as the perspective of my paper. Then we had to come up with three sentences that show what perspectives we used. I had not written my paper yet. In fact, I could not decide what topic to use.
The topic of my narrative paper is. These were the words I stared at for almost 30 minutes. The words almost starred back at me, sticking its tongue out at me, daunting me. I had no idea what to write about. Nothing in my life was interesting enough to write about. Mrs. Schukman suggested making a time line of my life to find a topic. So I started one on the back of the Narrative Worksheet. I started of course with my birth in 1983, went trough my time in Copperas Cove, Texas, to when I was at space camp, and all the way to now. I kept going on the timeline. Maybe it is my very huge ego that thinks that my life will extend beyond now but I still did not have a topic. So I went on. I marked through my time in college in Gainesville, Florida, to law school, to my time in the House of Representatives, then in the senate, to the White House. I still, however, had no idea what to write about. I thought about it day and night. I crushed Coke cans on my head (exaggeration alert) to come up with a idea. I rammed my self into walls, I ran 20 miles a day hoping something would give me an idea of what to write about. Then I had an epiphany. It came to like a like a lightning bolt comes to soccer players. It was though a light bulb went on above my head. It could also have been my dad replacing the dead bulb in my room. I decided to write an essay about writing this essay.
I had waited till the last minute to begin writing this essay. I felt I could write it anyway. I was prepared. I had my peanut butter and jelly, 6 sheets of paper, and a pencil. The cold pencil, however, had no lead. There was no lead in the cupboard, there was no lead on my desk, there was no lead anywhere. Not one piece of .7mm lead in the whole house. How was I supposed to write a report without lead? I could not use my pen because I write extremely sloppy with a pen, especially after 6 pages. So I decided to type the narrative paper on the computer. First, I started up the Internet, connected and turned the radio to Planet Radio 93.3. I then started up StarOffice and started typing. Then I remembered that StarOffice has no grammar check so I decided to type my paper using Bill Gates’ piece of junk, Word 97. Then the music stopped. My brother had kicked me off the Internet and was now without music. I could not possibly continue my narrative essay like this, but I must if I am to get a halfway decent grade. So, I started it up and felt confident that I was going to get it done.
God, I hate narrative essays. You have to write about your own personal experiences and expect to get a three-page paper out of it. I have no events in my life that would fit a three-page paper. The events in my life are either to foggy in my mind, are too insignificant in my mind to fit a three-page paper, or are too big and broad to be able to fit in an essay and would need a 500-page book to explain. I do far better at other kinds of essays than narratives, such as the persuasive paper. I look forward to those kinds of essays more than I look forward at all to doing any more narrative essays. In, the mean time, however, I am going to try to get James to get off the Internet. Maybe then I may have a better narrative topic. I hate narrative essays anyway.
