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, 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").

A narrative is the telling of some actual or fictitious sequence of connected events to an audience, by a narrator in some cases (and in all cases of written narratives). A personal narrative is any narrative in prose in which the speaker or writer presents, usually informally and in a spontaneous moment, their own personal experiences, such as in casual face-to-face conversation or in text messaging. Narratives are to be distinguished from simple descriptions of qualities, states, or situations without any particular individuals involved. Narratives range all the way from the shortest accounts of events (for example, the simple sentence "the cat sat on the mat" or a brief news item) to the most extended works, in the form of long and complex series that contain multiple books, films, television episodes, etc.

The topic of narrative can be organized into a number of thematic or formal categories. Nonfiction includes creative nonfiction, biography, journalism, historiography, and other storytelling forms grounded fully in facts and history. Fiction, however, departs from this complete basis in facts and history. For instance, fictionalization of historical events, such as myths, legends, works of historical fiction, and some anecdotes have a basis in past real-life events but add in imaginary or supernatural events or characters. Fiction in its other forms includes short stories, novels, most films, and imaginary narratives in other textual forms, games, or live or recorded performances. In the study of literary (written) fiction, it is usual to distinguish first-person from third-person narratives. Narrative poems and songs can be either fictional (like epics) or nonfictional (like transcript poems). Narrative poetry is distinct from lyric poetry, which focuses on the speaker's emotions and lacks a plot, setting, or other required narrative elements. Furthermore, nearly all dramatic enactments (plays, musicals, operas, ballets, etc.) are narratives.

Certain basic elements are necessary and sufficient to define all works of narrative, including, most well-studied, all fictional narrative works. Thus, scholars also commonly refer to the following essential elements of narrative as the elements of fiction.

Characters are the individual persons inside a work of narrative; their choices and behaviors propel the plot forward. They typically are named humans whose actions and speech sometimes convey important motives. They may be entirely imaginary, they may be real-life individuals, or they may be roughly based on real-life individuals. The audience's first impressions are influential on how they perceive a fictional character, for example whether they empathize with a character or not, feeling for them as if they were real. The audience's familiarity with a character results in their expectations about how characters will behave in later scenes. Characters who behave contrary to their previous patterns of behavior (their characterization) can be confusing or jarring to the audience.