Narrative Text. Narrative texts recount real or imaginary events, presenting the characters who perform the actions and the places where they take place. They explain the connection between events and show how they unfold over time.
They can narrate events that actually happened, as do newspaper articles, travel reports or biographies, or fictional stories, as do novels, short stories, fairy tales, fables and other literary texts. The narration can follow the order in which the events occurred or it can anticipate certain episodes or, on the contrary, go back to circumstances in the past with a leap backwards called a flashback. Let's compare two examples.
That morning, silence woke him up. Marco Valdo got out of bed with the feeling of something strange in the air. He didn't know what time it was. The light between the slats of the shutters was different from that at any time of day or night. He opened the window.
The city was gone, it had been replaced by a blank sheet of paper. This story follows linear time, while the following one jumps from past to future. In fact, numerous temporal indicators are concentrated in a few lines. Bara Bass arrived at the family home by sea. He wrote down little Clarice notes in his delicate handwriting.
Even then, he had the habit of writing down important things and later, when she was mute, He also wrote down trivialities, without suspecting that 50 years later his notebooks would be useful to me to redeem the memory of the past and to survive my own terror. The narrator, that is, the one who tells the events, can be a character inside the story or external, when he is extraneous to the events and observes them from the outside. In this case, he can interpret them or, on the contrary, present them without judging them. He should not be confused with the author, who is the real person who writes the text.
The author chooses the point of view from which he wants the story to be told and thus creates a narrative voice. To write a narrative text, the first step is to define a plot, establishing the characters, the places and times, the events and their connection. The transition from the idea to the actual writing requires some decisions.
You have to choose a narrative order and a point of view and consequently entrust the floor to a narrator. The narrative sequences, that is, the various moments of the story, can be alternated with descriptions, reflections or dialogues to make the reading more interesting and engaging.