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Step 5. Key Narrative Elements — Setting, Dialogue, and Blocking

One of the main goals of a narrative is to pull readers into your story, so that they can
really picture the events, emotions, and details. To accomplish this, you’ll want to writing workshop
include descriptions of setting along with dialogue and blocking. Giving your readers
details about when and where your story takes place helps pull them into your narrative,
as in this excerpt from Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, in which Carrie Brownstein
describes the setting of the hospital where she is meeting her mother and the difficulties /
she has accepting her mother’s illness:
Like any part of a hospital, an eating disorder unit has a smell. The smell is like a color that Writing a Narrative
doesn’t have a recognizable hue, an Easter egg dipped into every kind of dye until it
possesses an unnamed ugliness. It is beige, it is skin, it is bile. The EDU smelled like protein-
rich powder supplements and chemical cleaners, like a hot, stinging exhale of despair.
As with the setting of a narrative, including dialogue in your piece can also serve
multiple purposes. First, it draws your readers in, helping them feel as if they are right
there in the middle of the action. Imagine that in your narrative you wanted to describe
an argument you had with your father. You could write, “Then my father and I got into a
really big fight.” Or, you could write it this way:
“What?” he said, staring down at me.

“Nothing,” I said, rolling my eyes at his cluelessness.
“Don’t you take that tone with me,” he said, getting even angrier.
“I . . . said . . . nothing,” refusing to look away from him, until he stormed out of the
room. Again.

Clearly, the dialogue here gives the reader a front-row seat to the argument, and even
more important, it reveals a whole lot more about their relationship than if we did not
hear the actual words. In “Us and Them,” David Sedaris uses dialogue to express his
and his sisters’ confusion and anger at a family, the Tomkeys, who decide to celebrate
Halloween one day late and show up at their house asking for candy:
“Why of course it’s not too late,” my mother said. “Kids, why don’t you . . . run and get . . .
the candy.”
“But the candy is gone,” my sister Gretchen said. “You gave it away last night.”
“Not that candy,” my mother said. “The other candy. Why don’t you run and go get it?”
“You mean our candy?” Lisa said. “The candy that we earned?”
This was exactly what our mother was talking about, but she didn’t want to say this in
front of the Tomkeys.

Blocking refers to the description of the actions, gestures, and movements of
people in your narrative, as in the end of the example above when the father “stormed
out of the room.” Like dialogue, the blocking adds a sense of realism and connection
for the reader, especially for us to better understand characters and conflict. Look
at this excerpt from “Wearing a Mask Won’t Protect Us from Our History,” in which
Uncorrected proofs have been used in this sample. 237
Copyright © Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.

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