I am currently reading a book about how to structure a successful book/movie script and the author Larry Brooks emphasizes that to have a successful story you need to make the story about a main character - a hero. Do you think this is the case or are there some examples of stories that break away from this model and are still very effective?
The goal is to make a story that centers on a more worldwide issue and that jumps around to many different characters and times in history if possible.
My story is probably more suited to a documentary in a lot of ways but for other reasons I feel it's better to try to tell what is going on as a dramatic story to try to keep people interested while learning a lot of dry information.
Are you trying to write a screenplay or a novel? Screenplays have format constraints. They have to be done in a certain way to be translatable for crews and they have to fit a visual medium that is based entirely on images and sounds, and they have all sorts of time constraints. There are ways to get around some of those constraints for some stories and there are screen works that are not about heroes, but there are a limited number of structures for theatric stories, even narrative documentaries.
Novels have none of these structural constraints. Novels are not limited to visual and auditory input and may be considerably abstract. Novels have no time constraints, budget, tech and scope constraints. A novel has no "acts" -- bundles of scenes, although it can borrow those structures if it wants. Many novels are not about heroes -- a hero and a protagonist are not the same thing. A novel may cover thousands of years and a lot of characters and are frequently not linear in timeframe. Novels are long pieces of fictional text. As such, novels may be made up of episodic, connected stories, multiple stories set in the same universe, multiple stories set in different universes, etc.
So it seems that you have a book that is explaining how to do one type of story structure, which may be of particular use in writing screenplays for film. But that won't necessarily fit what you are doing.
Non-fiction does often make use of anecdote, analogies and fictional examples to present factual information. A fictional framework of two characters who discuss the factual information in a documentary has been a popular format for documentaries, especially educational ones for schools. (Let Bugs Bunny or My Little Pony teach you physics!) So an actual novel or a fictional screenplay narrative format may not be necessary for what you want to do, even if you use a non-real narrator, dramatizations, speculative skits, etc. to create mini stories to convey non-fiction information. And some non-fiction stories, such as memoirs, convey both facts and real life stories that can be just as effective or more than fictional ones, and that is often used for history information.
Or you can do a fictional story that has a lot of facts in it. People do that. But if your goal is not to do a heroic narrative, then there's not much point in throwing one into it.
