Finding The Story’s Micro-Manifestation

I recently did a pre-production story consultation with Katie Teague, an award-winning director with whom I’ve worked before.

She came up with a brilliant new term that many directors will find helpful when confronting the most important question about a narrative arc: “What does the protagonist want?”

For some documentaries the answer is obvious. In Free Solo, Alex Honnold wants to be the first person to climb Yosemite’s El Capitan without ropes or safety gear.

In Man on Wire, Philippe Petit wants to walk a high-wire between the Twin Towers.

And in HBO’s Fifty Children, a film we helped structure, the quest to save fifty youngsters from the Nazis is in the subtitle: “The Rescue Mission of Mr. And Mrs. Kraus”.

But for many directors trying to conceive a character-driven documentary, their protagonist’s goal is not so grand, concrete or discernible. What then?

In Katie’s new film RE:MEMBER, her protagonist has lost her son. Her quest? To change our death-averse society—so that the grieving process is more accepted.

Katie and I asked ourselves, how do we make such a lofty desire tangible?

We had to come up with something that would at least show incremental progress toward that qualitative goal.

We eventually honed in on the idea of filming her protagonist leading a grief ritual (which she’d been trying to do anyway). Since this task would be challenging for her main character, it fit the criteria that a story goal must be difficult–not a piece of cake.

With her permission, I’m quoting Katie: “This is a micro-manifestation of her bigger desire to ‘un-silence’ grief in our culture.”

A micro-manifestation. I love that term! Basically it captures how you can map a narrative arc by finding a representative achievement, one that can reveal character transformation in a cinematic way.

Here are some more examples of “micro-manifestations” in films we’ve recently helped structure:

In Life is Rich, which won a 2018 Audience Award, a Jewish mother wants to instill more spiritual meaning in her daughters’ lives. One of her micro-goals is schlepping her resistant daughters to meet with rabbis.

In Living While Dying, which won the 2018 Resiliency in Aging Award, director Cathy Zheutlin wants to come to terms with her own mortality. Her “micro-manifestation” is getting her estate affairs in order, something she was unable to do at the start of the film.

For more ideas about constructing a narrative arc, download my article:

Reality in Three Acts: What Documentary Storytellers Can Learn From Screenwriters.