Movement:
Action is indispensable in a narrative essay, the sense of people and things moving through time and space. Close study of short story writers will pay off in the long run here. The non-intuitive device most of them use is knowing that when you want to describe something that happens very fast, your text and your selection of details and descriptions of action must slow down. It would be instructive to reproduce here comedian Eddie Murphy’s description of his auntie falling down the stairs – something she apparently did repeatedly, predictably, and without injury. Murphy reproduces all the sounds she makes at every step as his aunt bounces down the stairway, calling upon every saint and deity she ever heard of and pronouncing ruin upon the house and its residents. The bit is hilarious and takes probably a minute or more to describe what must have taken, in reality, only a couple of seconds. All of us, to our horror, know that “slow motion” effect as we slide on an icy road; the trick is to recapture that in our text. Practice by describing such an event or describing the details of eating an Oreo cookie or fig newton cookie. Leave nothing out.