Story vs.

Narrative
It’s the way you tell it.
Narrative is the choice of which events to relate and in what order to relate
them – so it is a representation or specific manifestation of the story, rather
than the story itself. The easy way to remember the difference between story
and narrative is to reshuffle the order of events. A new event order means you
have a new narrative of the same story.

Narrative turns story into information, or better, into knowledge for the
recipient (the audience or reader). Each story event is a unit of knowledge the
audience requires.

A narrative is paradox, because it seeks to convey truth by hiding it. A

storyteller arranges the items of knowledge in such a way that they are
revealed gradually, which implies initially obscuring the truth behind what is
told. Such deliberate authorial obfuscation creates a sense of mystery or
tension, and creates a desire in the audience to find out what is happening in
the story and why. In this sense, a narrative is effectively the opposite of an
account or a report.

A report presents information in order to be understood by the audience

immediately, as it is being related. A neutral matter of fact presentation
probably maintains a chronology of events. It explains a state of affairs blow
by blow, and aims for maximum clarity at every stage. It seeks to convey truth
by simply telling it. While the point of a narrative is also that the recipient
perceives the truth of the story, in a narrative this truth is conveyed
indirectly. Narrative is therefore responsible for how the recipient perceives
the story.

In this article we’ll look at

 Story Basics
 The Components of Story
 Text Types That Describe A Story
 Author Choices: Genre and Point of View
 Causality in Narrative

Story Basics

First, let’s state some basics as we understand them here at Beemgee: a

story consists of events that are related by a narrator; events consist
of actions carried out by characters; characters are motivated, they have
reasons for the things they do; there is conflict involved; one and the same
story may be told in different ways, that is, have varying narratives.

Note that we are talking here about narrative in the dramaturgical sense – not
in the social sense. Like the term “storytelling”, the word “narrative” has
become a bit of a buzzword. We are not referring here to open “social
narratives” such as “the American narrative”. We are pinpointing the use of
the term primarily for storytellers creating novels, films, plays, and the like.
Such works tend in their archetypal form to be closed narratives with a
beginning, a middle, and an end.

A narrative may present the events of the story in linear, that is to

say chronological order or not. But the story remains the story – even if it is
told backwards. And that’s the easy way to remember the difference between
story and narrative: if you reshuffle the order of events, you are changing the
narrative – the way you tell the story –, and perhaps its premise too, but you
are not changing the story itself.