A narrative is a story or account of events, whether real or imagined. When you tell your friend what happened during your summer vacation, you're creating a narrative. When a historian writes about the American Revolution, she's constructing a narrative of those events. Novels, movies, and even video games all contain narratives that unfold as you read, watch, or play.

A narrative tells what happened, usually in a sequence that makes sense. A good narrative has a beginning, middle, and end, with events connected in a way that helps the reader or listener understand what's going on.

Sometimes people use narrative to describe the way events are being interpreted or explained. If two witnesses describe the same accident differently, they're presenting different narratives. In this sense, a narrative is a way of selecting, arranging, and explaining facts to create meaning. When someone says “that's not the whole narrative,” they mean you're only hearing part of the story.

As an adjective, narrative describes something that tells a story, like a narrative poem or a narrative style of writing.

Writers and journalists often work in narrative nonfiction, telling true stories using the techniques of fiction writing to make them engaging and vivid. A narrator is the person or voice telling the story.