Narrative and Non Narrative Writing

Narrative and Non Narrative Writing

When any form of story is written it can be classed as a narrative or non-narrative piece. This, in its simplest terms, refers to whether it is fictional or factual.

Narrative writing is easily the most well-known form of storytelling and writing. Present in many books, films, and TV Shows, its primary identification is that it has a beginning, middle, and end, in both fictional and non-fictional writing. More in depth traits narrative writing has are:

Its Organisation- Narrative writing gradually weaves exposition and character development throughout the script. It also paces the story in order to build tension, and excitement, and gives it peaks and troughs in action to pace it properly and keep the reader/viewer intrigued.

Grammar- In books, it has been known for authors to bend grammatical rules, spelling structures, and punctuation in order to please the reader, this is also one of the reasons exclamation points were created as fictional writing is the only form that requires the exclamation point to help portray enthusiasm in dialogue.

And Tone: Tone is employed by writers almost exclusively as it channels emotions through the writing helping to immerse the reader further into the story. This is also used in visual storytelling as well but generally through more subtle ways such as lighting, the delivering of a line, or in the accompanying score.

Here are some examples of narrative films:

With a factual piece however, it’s a lot more structured with a much more rigid set of rules. The only changing part of factual documentaries is their organisation as there is no set beginning, middle, or end. As the timeline for factual documentaries tend to be very fluid on where they could begin or end, and they have a limit to how much they can include, they have to choose where it begins and ends which can restrict the factual content. Other than that though, non-narrative productions have very little tone, its only employed in certain scenes to induce very extreme emotions; And as mentioned previously, the grammar is incredibly strict as a factual pieces should be.

Here are some examples of non-narrative films: