Narrative

A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether non-fictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travelogue, etc.) or fictional (fairy tale, fable, legend, thriller, novel, etc.). Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, through still or moving images, or through any combination of these. Narrative is expressed in all mediums of human creativity, art, and entertainment, including speech (oral literature), literature, theatre, dance, music and song, comics, journalism, animation, video (including film and television), video games, radio, structured and unstructured recreation, and potentially even purely visual arts like painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography, as long as a sequence of events is presented. The social and cultural activity of humans sharing narratives is called storytelling, the vast majority of which has taken the form of oral storytelling. Since the rise of literate societies however, many narratives have been additionally recorded, created, or otherwise passed down in written form. The formal and literary process of constructing a narrative — narration — is one of the four traditional rhetorical modes of discourse, along with argumentation, description, and exposition. This is a somewhat distinct usage from narration in the narrower sense of a commentary used to convey a story, alongside various additional narrative techniques used to build and enhance any given story. The noun narration and adjective narrative entered English from French in the 15th century; narrative became usable as a noun in the following century. These words ultimately derive from the Latin verb narrare ("to tell"), itself derived from the adjective gnarus ("knowing or skilled").