We tell stories through different genres: the novel, the short story, the film script or the theater. The events and characters that are described are presented through a certain narrative sequence.
Generate life and form to words and ideas
A narrative sequence could be defined as the way to chain some facts when telling them. In a general sense, every narrative sequence has to maintain a structure, and the most traditional is one that is based on three aspects: the setting of the story, the middle and the ending. These three elements are always present, although their order can be altered and the narrator can also use different techniques to relate the different sequences (the racconto, the flashback or the flashforward are some of the methods used to explain some events).
In any case, in every narrative sequence there is a combination of temporality (for example, in the racconto something is narrated from the past to the present). Thus, it is possible to distinguish three dimensions in time to relate one action to another: anteriority (something happened before something else), simultaneity (something happens while a different event is happening) or posteriority (for example, "after my holidays, days of great concern arrived ").
The idea of narrative sequence expresses the order that is established to tell, to tell a story. It must be borne in mind that any story has a series of structures (the different sequences) that are combined with each other with the use of the different verb forms that place the reader in the past, the present or the future.
Time in the narrative sequence
When we tell something there is a curious phenomenon: different times are combined. If, for example, someone writes his autobiography, he needs to order the different moments of his life in a certain space. This disparity in time is known as anachrony and is a fundamental aspect in any narrative sequence.
An anachrony is the non-coincidence or discordance between two temporal realities: the order of the story and the order or succession in the story. The two areas are not necessarily coincident, so the narrator of a novel or a story must present a common thread, that is, a narrative sequence that combines the different temporal planes and, all of this, with a determined rhythm in the narrative.
The technical difficulty of managing time in a narrative is one of the most difficult issues in the writing business. In fact, when something is communicated in a literary way, not only events and characters are recreated, but there is also a reconstruction of time and, at the same time, time passes more or less slowly (it is common to hear that a film is very slow).
