Identufy the six techniques for writing a successful narrative, and Essay

Identufy the six techniques for writing a successful narrative, and describe how this can be applied to one or more of the reading in Part 3 of your textbook - Essay Example They can even be therapeutic – giving us an outlet to express ourselves and deal with emotions that might otherwise be threatening or unpleasant (Parker and Wampler, 2006). The common bond of all stories is the narrative aspect – how the story is written, or told. According to Arlov (2005), there are six aspects of an effectively written story. These are: using chronological order; having a conflict that must be resolved; showing the action, instead of just telling what happened; making a clearly defined point – the theme of the story; placing a greater emphasis on the most important details; and using examples from everyday life (Arlov, 2005). In this paper, the art of storytelling – the successful incorporation of each of these aspects - is examined in the work of Obafemi Carr. Carr’s story, â€Å"The Game of My Life,† is (on the surface) about his participation, as a 29-year-old man, in a YMCA basketball game. A deeper analysis, however, reveals that it is about his relationship with his father and, perhaps to a greater extent, about his ability to overcome his own youthful insecurities. The beginning action starts at the present moment – in the basketball, but then the story flashes back to the â€Å"beginning† - the narrator (Carr)’s childhood. From there, Carr progresses in chronological order to his teenage and college years, and then he takes the reader back to the present with him – back to the ball game. This flashback-flash forward device works because it only displaces the reader chronologically for the first three paragraphs in order to better set up the story’s tension. Carr’s story has one main conflict that needs to be resolved. From the story’s text, the reader gathers that Carr grew up feeling distanced from his father because of his lack of sports involvement. As Carr puts it, â€Å"My father hadnt taught me the game, probably because he had grown up in