The elements of narratives are symbols that stand for real or imagined events and actors, where the latter are animate beings or inanimate forces. Th… - Lee Roy Beach

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The elements of narratives are symbols that stand for real or imagined events and actors, where the latter are animate beings or inanimate forces. The glue that binds the elements is causality and implied purpose. The narrative is a temporal arrangement of events that are purposefully caused by animate beings or are the result of inanimate forces. The narrative’s story line is the emergent meaning created by arranging the elements according to time, purpose, and causality. Just as arranging words into sentences creates emergent meaning that unarranged words do not have, and just as arranging sentences into larger units creates even more emergent meaning, arranging events, actors, time, purpose, and causality into a narrative creates the emergent meaning that is its story line or plot.A “good narrative” is coherent and plausible; coherent when effects can be accounted for by causes and plausible when the actions of its actors are consistent with their own or similar actors’ actions across contexts (i.e., across different narratives). We tend to believe that good narratives are valid.