The phrase "a narrative template" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when referring to a structured outline or framework for storytelling or writing narratives.
Example: "The author provided a narrative template to help students organize their thoughts before writing their stories."
Alternatives: "story framework" or "plot outline".
It is also less original: Mr. McCann often seems to be using "Let the Great World Spin" — along with E. L. Doctorow novels like "Ragtime" — as a kind of narrative template, and he frequently strains to tie together his characters' overlapping lives with self-conscious, writerly language.
The journey provides a helpful diachronic narrative template that knits together individual role and career transitions to bridge past and present, whose changing contours and contexts are given explanatory coherence by an overarching life story (Habermas and Bluck, 2000).
The Homeric journey, grounded in the wish to return home, is at once the most venerable of all narrative templates and, as "The Way Back" demonstrates, one of the trickiest to dramatize.
Issues that could make a difference in the lives of Americans didn't fit into the narrative template and, therefore, took a back seat to these superficialities.
It purports to have no preconceived narrative template whatsoever.
Perhaps the Academy just likes that most classical narrative template of all: the story of love.
Oddly, though, the narrative template is shockingly ancient: it's the first Spider-Man movie, which came out, like, six years ago.
Each film is happy to follow the narrative template of their forerunners, but will accept none of the thematic weight.
I think filmmaker Josh Fox is exactly right to say, as he does in "The Sky is Pink," that gas industry denials of harm fit into the narrative template of the tobacco story.
Suffice it to say, The New World is not, as you may have read, a gooey specimen of incontinent pictorialism; nor "a Tony Scott movie on quaaludes"; nor conceived to accord at any point or in any wise with the three-act, plot-pointed Syd Field-type narrative template that taints modern American cinema.
Kumar, a goonish figure in his recent action-comedies, demonstrates a newfound maturity that becomes him, but these characters never feel like the flesh-and-blood human beings they were in the original; they're really just Weebles, to be knocked down and reset as the narrative template demands.
