Alex Goswami's Key Ideas from Documentary Storytelling
by Sheila Curran Bernard

Story Basics:

A story is the narrative, or telling, of an event or series of events, crafted in a way to interest the audience, whether they are readers, listeners, or viewers. At its most basic, a story has a beginning, middle, and end. It has compelling characters, rising tension, and conflict that reaches some sort of resolution. It engages the audi- ence on an emotional and intellectual level, motivating viewers to want to know what happens next

Audience have empathy for main character.

• This somebody wants something very badly.

• This something is difficult—but possible—to do, get, or achieve.

• The story is told for maximum emotional impact and audience participation in the proceedings.

• The story must come to a satisfactory ending.

The somebody is your protagonist, your hero, the entity whose story is being told. Note that your hero can, in fact, be very “unheroic,” and the audience might struggle to empathize with him or her.

But the character and/or character’s mission should be compelling enough that the audience cares about outcome.

The something that somebody wants is also referred to as a goal or an objective.

Storytellers speak of active versus passive goals and active versus passive heroes. In general, you want a story’s goals and heroes to be active, which means that you want your story’s protagonist to be in charge of his or her own life: To set a goal and then to go about doing what needs to be done to achieve it.

It does have to matter enough to be worth committing significant time and resources to.

If you only care a little about your protagonists and what they want, your financiers and audience are likely to care not at all.

The something that is wanted—the goal—must be difficult to do or achieve. If something is easy, there’s no tension, and without tension, there’s little incentive for an audience to keep watching.

Tension is the feeling we get when issues or events are unresolved, especially when we want them to be resolved. It’s what motivates us to demand, “And then what happens? And what happens after that?” We need to know, because it makes us uncomfortable not to know.

Think of a movie thriller in which you’re aware, but the heroine is not, that danger lurks in the cellar. As she heads toward the steps, you feel escalating tension because she is walking toward danger. If you didn’t know that the bad guy was in the basement, she would just be a girl heading down some stairs. Without tension, a story feels flat; you don’t care one way or the other about the outcome

Weather, illness, war, self-doubt, inexperience, hubris—all of these can pose obstacles as your protagonist strives to achieve his or her goal. And just as it can be useful to tell a complex story.

Just as you want your protagonist to have a worthy goal, you want him or her to have a worthy opponent. A common problem for many filmmakers is that they portray opponents as one- dimensional; if their hero is good, the opponent must be bad.

In fact, the most memorable opponent is often not the opposite of the hero, but a complement to him or her.

The concept of telling a story for greatest emotional impact and audience participation is perhaps the most difficult. It’s often described as “show, don’t tell,”

which means that you want to present the evidence or information that allows viewers to experience the story for themselves, anticipating twists and turns and following the story line in a way that’s active rather than passive

Another tool of emotional storytelling is to have something at stake and to raise the stakes until the very end.

a good storyteller, even small stakes can be made large when their importance to those in the story is conveyed. 

A satisfactory ending, or resolution, is often one that feels both unexpected and inevitable. It must resolve the one story you set out to tell.