E046 Brian McDonald on the Art & Craft of Storytelling (Part 1)

Bio  

Brian McDonald, an award-winning author, filmmaker, graphic novelist, and podcaster, is a sought-after instructor and consultant. He has taught his story seminar and consulted for various companies, including Pixar, Microsoft, and Cirque du Soleil.  

Interview Highlights  

02:45 The gift of writing

04:00 Rejected by Disney

05:35 Defining a story

07:25 Conclusions

10:30 Why do we tell stories?

13:40 Survival stories

17:00 Finding the common thread

19:00 The Golden Theme

 20:45 Neuroscience  

Connect  

Brian McDonald (writeinvisibleink.com)

@BeeMacDee1950 on X

@beemacdee on Instagram

Brian McDonald on LinkedIn

 Books and references  

Land of the Dead: Lessons from the Underworld on Storytelling and Living, Brian McDonald

Invisible Ink: Building Stories from the Inside Out, Brian McDonald

The Golden Theme: How to Make Your Writing Appeal to the Highest Common Denominator, Brian McDonald

Old Souls, Brian McDonald

Ink Spots: Collected Writings on Story Structure, Filmmaking and Craftmanship, Brian McDonald

Brian's podcast 'You are a Storyteller'

Episode Transcript  

Ula Ojiaku  

Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Very honoured to introduce my guest for this episode, Brian McDonald,. He’s an award-winning author, filmmaker, graphic novelist and podcaster. Brian is a sought-after speaker, instructor and consultant who has taught his story seminar and consulted for companies like Pixar, Microsoft, and Cirque du Soleil. In this first part of our two-part episode, we discuss the gift of writing, his experience being rejected by Disney, his book Invisible Ink, that book is lifechanging. We also discuss defining a story, conclusions, and why we tell stories. Stay tuned for an insightful conversation!  Brian, it's a pleasure to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast and an honour. Thank you for making the time for this conversation.  

Brian McDonald

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

 Ula Ojiaku

 Awesome. So could you tell us a bit about yourself? What are the things that have led you to being the Brian McDonald we know today?

Brian McDonald

 How I got to be, I guess, a story expert or whatever it is I am, the memory I have is of being in kindergarten and seeing an animated film about King Midas, and I was obsessed with it. It was stop motion animation, so it was frightening, it scared me, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. So I got obsessed with stop motion animation and I got obsessed with the story of King Midas and I thought about stories a lot. We lived not very far away from a drive-in movie theatre, and so we would, as a family, watch movies from our porch, and I remember, because we couldn't hear them, I remember piecing together the stories that we couldn't hear, and I would tell my younger brother and my sister what I assumed was happening. So it was an early, early thing for me. I didn't know necessarily that I was studying it, I was just obsessed with it. What made it work and what made people laugh and what made them scared and what made them lean forward, that was fascinating to me, but I didn't know I had any particular gift for it, until I guess I was in the seventh or eighth grade when a friend of mine did a drawing and he said to me, Brian, come up with a story for this drawing because you're good at that. I didn't know I was good at it, right. It was so natural to me, and so I just pursued that path. I wanted to be a director. Before that, before the 70s, not every director was a writer, but in the 70s, it seemed like every director was a writer. So Francis Ford Coppola was a writer, Steven Spielberg was a writer, George Lucas was a writer. So I thought that's what you had to do. And I had dyslexia, so writing scared me, it was difficult for me, but wanting to tell stories overrode that, and I just thought that's what I had to do, so I just kept doing it and pretty soon, accidentally became an expert at it, where people would start asking me for advice and the people who started asking me for advice were higher and higher up the food chain. I remember I was on a plane next to some award winning writer and I happened to be sitting next to him and I was star struck that I got to sit next to him on this plane and we were talking and I thought we were just talking about story stuff and then he said, do you mind if I take notes? So I thought, okay, maybe I've got something, but I didn't think anything I was saying was worthy of taking notes, but he did. Yeah, and then I wrote the book for two reasons. I submitted a screenplay to Disney for their fellowship program, and it was rejected in the first round, and I didn't think that was right, and they also gave me a list of books I could read about screenwriting, and I was so angry and I thought, have you read these books, because I could write one of these books, and so I did. So then I had a student, the first class I ever taught, I didn't mean to be a teacher, it happened accidentally. I needed some money and somebody needed a screenwriting teacher and so, I said, well, sure, I'll try it. It turns out I had a talent for it that I didn't know I had. So a woman in my class said to me, oh, you should write a book, and I said yeah, people say that, and she looked me dead in the eye and she said, no, you're good at this, you're good at communicating it, you have a responsibility to write a book. So those two things made me write the book.

 Ula Ojiaku

 I'm thankful, because when you experienced those things and sometimes they seem negative in the moment. So who would have thought that being rejected for a fellowship with Disney would lead to better things in my view, of bigger, better things. It's really amazing. I'm glad you did because we wouldn't be having this conversation if you didn't. Thank you again. Your work is affecting even other generations. I know my children definitely are big fans already. You being a storyteller and I don't want to read your book out to the audience, how would you define storytelling?

 Brian McDonald

First you have to define story. I noticed that most people who teach writing, who teach anything about story, just start talking about it without defining it, and it has a definition, story has a definition, and I find that people are using the word story, it's become a very hip word at this moment and I'll tell you what made me look it up. I heard an interview with a jazz bassist on the radio and this jazz bassist, I wish I could remember who it was, but apparently if you play jazz, this is the bassist you want, and the interviewer said, well, how did you become that guy? How did you become the guy everybody wants? And he said, well, I was a bassist for a long time and I was pretty good, and he said, one day I decided to look up bass in the dictionary, and he said, a bass is a foundation. Everything is built on the bass, and he said, once I understood that, I knew what my job was, and I became a better bassist. So, I'm like, I should probably look up the definition of what I do. So, I looked up the word story, and one of the definitions, now I've altered the definition and I'll tell you why, but I've altered it slightly. So a story is the telling or retelling of a series of events leading to a conclusion, meaning having a point. So one of the first questions I asked my classes is ‘what a story is’, and I let them struggle with it for a while because, once you hear it, it sounds like, of course, that's what it is. So I let them struggle for minutes, uncomfortable minutes coming up with all these things, because then they know they didn't know. Before they would say nothing. Now I think they've heard some of what I say or read it somewhere and they come back like they're repeating something I said, but without understanding it. So they'll say a series of events and I'll be like, no, it's not a series of events. It's the telling or retelling of a series of events. Right. That's a huge part of it. Right. So also leading to a conclusion, which I think is a huge part of it, and that's the part I added. Now, here's the thing, I don't know if you know how they write dictionaries, but how they write dictionaries is they go around and they ask people they think are smart, what words mean. That's what they do. That's how they do it. What do you think this word means? And then they get a consensus. And so this many people thought this, that's why you have a number one and number two and number three. Well, people who know that stuff are word people. I'm not a word person. I'm a story person. These are different things. We conflate the two things. We think they're the same, but they're not the same. You don't need words at all to tell a story. The first 30 years of movies were silent, ask any choreographer or dancer or pantomimist, you don't need it, right? We put them together, but they don't necessarily go together. The people who define story as the telling or retelling of a series of events are word people, but as a storyteller, I know that stories have a function. So they are leading to a conclusion. So that's the part I added, because they were word people, not story people, and for a story person, that was not a definition for me that worked, but I think that my definition helps people write stories, whereas the other definition does not.

Ula Ojiaku

Can I ask you a question about your definition of a story, because you said it’s leading to a conclusion. Would you say that the storyteller has to tell that conclusion, or is this something that the people being told the story would infer or a mixture?

Brian McDonald

Oh that depends. So a lot of times people will talk about resolution, that a story needs to resolve, happily ever after, but if you look in the east, they don't necessarily resolve, but they do conclude, they do allow you to draw a conclusion. A lot of Zen parables are like that, where it's almost as if it's left hanging, but it isn't exactly left hanging. I talk about this in my book, Land of the Dead, but there's a story about a monk and he's walking through the jungle, he sees a tiger, and the tiger starts to chase him, so he's running from this tiger, and he gets to the edge of a cliff, and so he's got the tiger behind him, and he's got the cliff in front of him, and he doesn't know what to do, he jumps, but he catches himself on a branch, a little branch, and the branch is starting to give way and there are these jagged rocks below. So if he falls, that's it. On the end of the branch, there are three strawberries growing, and he reaches out and he grabs strawberries and he eats them, and they're the best strawberries he's ever had. That's the end of that story, because the conclusion is all about how precious life becomes when we know it's near the end, and we could take that into our lives because we never know when it's going to be over, right, so that's a conclusion to be drawn from the story. It doesn't resolve - does he get out of it? How does he get out of it? What happens when… it doesn't resolve, but it concludes. So I like the word conclusion more than I like the word resolution.

Ula Ojiaku

Thanks for that, Brian. So now that you've laid the foundation for us on what a story is, what's storytelling then?

Brian McDonald

Well, you have to then ask what stories are for. Why do people tell stories? All around the world, in every culture, in every time, human beings have been storytellers. Why? Now people will come back and they'll say entertainment. That's not why you. You don't need stories to entertain. There's lots of things you could do. Think about it for a second. We tell stories all the time. We think we're just talking, but we tell stories all the time when we're having conversations. We don't even know we're telling stories, but we do it all the time. Then we tell ourselves stories. You have an imaginary conversation with somebody, right? Well, then he'll say this and then I'll say this and then he'll say that, and then I'll say…so you're telling yourself the story. You do it all the time, right? And then when you come home and you want to relax, you'll find a story either on your television or your phone or a book, that's the way we relax, so we do it all day long, right? And then we want to relax and we find a story to relax too. Then we go to sleep and we tell ourselves stories when we sleep. Well, that's a lot of energy for one thing, and the only conclusion I can draw is that it's a survival mechanism, because that's just the way evolution works. It had to have been selected for. The people who didn't tell stories are not here, so it has to be selected for, and anything that's selected for has an evolutionary advantage. There's no other animal that would spend that much time doing anything if it wasn't related to their survival, it doesn't make sense. And there are clues to this. So, some of the clues are, first of all, you'll notice with children. If you tell children it's story time, they lose their mind, and I think the reason they do that is because they are new to the world and they need to know how it works, and stories tell them how it works. So they are feeding in a way. I think story stories and food are very close together in terms of how important they are to us. As a matter of fact, if you found yourself in some place or something without food, you would start to immediately think of stories about people in that situation and how they got out of it. So that's one clue. The other clue is that any writing teacher will tell you that stories need conflict, that you have to have conflict in the story, and they would always say to me when I would ask as a kid, well, why, and they'd say, it's more interesting, for me, that's not really an answer. I think because I'm dyslexic, I have to go to the very basic part of it. Like, no, that's not an answer. There's an answer, and it's that conflict is the thing that we're trying to survive. Stories aren't necessarily entertaining, but they are engaging. Sometimes entertaining, sometimes they're just engaging, take Schindler's List. Is that entertaining? No, but it's engaging, so I think that the reason that we find stories engaging, and sometimes entertaining is because nature wants us to engage in that activity. It's why food tastes good. It wants us to engage in that activity. So it's a by-product, entertainment is a by-product of good storytelling.

Ula Ojiaku

It makes perfect sense, and I've watched a few of your episodes on the You Are A Storyteller podcast on your website writeinvisibleink.com and you said something about that stories can heal, can save lives. So it's not just about the entertainment factor. Can you expand on that, please?

Brian McDonald

Now, it's funny, I talk about survival and a lot of times people go immediately to physical survival, but there's all kinds of survival, so there's cultural survival, there is social survival, don't act this way, act that way. There is emotional or spiritual survival, and you'll see that with support groups, 12 step programmes, anything like that, where stories are medicinal, both the sharing of the story and the taking in of the story. Again, nature wants us to engage in that activity, and so we don't even know we're doing it. When I was a kid, we moved from one neighbourhood to another and it snowed one day and a friend of mine said, a new friend of mine, he said he came to the house and he said, hey, we're going to Dawson Hill. I didn't know what it was. What's Dawson Hill? Well, it's a big hill. There's a Dawson Street was the street. It's a big hill, and everybody goes sledding down this hill when it snows. Okay, so I go up there, and when I get up there, I hear this story. I probably told this story later, I don't remember, but I'm sure I did, I heard it retold to new kids all the time. So when you were a new kid in the neighbourhood, you would hear this story. There was a kid about a generation older than us. I actually worked with a woman years later who was from the same neighbourhood, and said she knew that story. She knew the story. She's a generation older than me, she knew the story. So anyway, a kid was going on an inner tube down the hill and he hit a utility pole and he got the wind knocked out of him and everybody gathered around, you know, are you okay, and it took him a minute to sort of recover, and he said, I'm fine, I'm okay, I'm fine, and he stayed for a little while, but after a while said he wasn't feeling well and he went home and took a nap and he never woke up because he had broken a rib and punctured an organ and was bleeding internally and didn't know it. Now, kids tell that story because that's the kind of story kids tell, right, but what were they saying to me? They were giving me survival information. Look, be careful going down this hill. They could have said that, that doesn't stick. The stories are what we've evolved to take in. So that doesn't stick. So, they don't even know they're doing it. This is how natural it is, they're just telling a story they think is creepy or interesting, whatever they think, but what they're saying is, be careful going down that hill, and if you do get hurt, you may not know how hurt you are, so get yourself checked out or let your parents know or something like that. There's two bits of survival information in that story. That's how natural it is. We do it all the time. And we navigate the world that way all the time, we just don't know we're doing it, and that's another thing, it's so natural. It's like breathing, there are people who study breath and how you breathe, but that's a whole field of study because we ignore it, and I think story is one of those things, as far as I know, you can go to school and you can study journalism and you can study medieval literature and you can study French poetry from whenever, you can study all of these things about writing, but I don't know if you can get a degree anywhere on story itself, which I find fascinating.

Ula Ojiaku

Unless you want to change that.

Brian McDonald

Maybe I will. I knew a woman who was a playwright and she would come to me for advice about storytelling, and she had a degree in playwriting. And I said, well, what did they teach you when you were in school? She said, it never came up. So it's interesting to me that we don't study that, which is the common denominator across all those other things. All those other disciplines have story at their core.

Ula Ojiaku

And that's what you were saying, the common denominator in The Golden Theme, I have digital copies of the other books, but The Golden Theme, that was what you were saying, that storytelling is the common denominator, if I remember correctly, but it's like something that runs through all of us as human beings.

Brian McDonald

Well, the thing is this, that stories have a point, they have a reason to be told, and I was looking for the thing that all stories had in common. One of the things, and again, this goes back to being dyslexic, but one of the things dyslexics do well, is see connections that other people miss. I'm bad with details, but I can see the big picture of things. Let's take the movie Seven Samurai was made into the movie Magnificent Seven. So it takes a samurai movie, they make it into a Western. What I see when I see those things is I say, this is about people learning how to stand up for themselves, this is about all these other things, and that doesn't matter if it's a Western or if it's, so I just see that how they're the same. The differences are superficial to me, I don't see those. So when people say what genre, if I'm writing something with genre, I'm like, I know what you mean, I don't know why it matters. I don't say that part, but I don't, because what matters is, is it compelling? Is it true about being a human being? Does it get to a truth? That's the important thing for me, and so I was looking for the common thread. Every story will have what I call an armature and I can explain what that is, but I thought, there's a common armature, there's got to be, that links all stories, and I thought about it for a long time. As a matter of fact, one of the things that got me started thinking about it was, I was walking through a cemetery with a friend of mine, we were working on a project, and it was a cemetery near where I lived, it's actually the cemetery where Bruce Lee is buried, and my mum is there now, which would have thrilled her to be close to Bruce Lee, but I was walking through that cemetery with a friend of mine and I said, you know, if these people could talk, I bet they would just have one thing to tell us. And he said, what? I go, I don't know, but I bet they'd have one thing to say that they would think this is the most, and I thought about that for a long time, so both The Golden Theme and Land of the Dead came out of that walk through the cemetery. So I thought about it for years, and in fact, it's a strange thing, I didn't even know it was happening. You know that sound of a chalkboard and the chalk, that sound, that was in my head constantly like I was working out some kind of equation, and I don't know if I'm synesthetic or something, but I could hear it, and then one day it stopped, and it was quiet, and what I call now The Golden Theme came to me. The one thing that the cemetery said and the thing that stories have in common is that we are all the same. That's what the cemetery tells you. We're all the same. We're all going to die one day. We all worry about the same stuff. We all care about the same things, and the closer you get to that in a story, because that's the underlying baseline, the more that story resonates with people, the more they see themselves in somebody they don't expect to see themselves in, the more it resonates. Wait, that person's nothing like me and yet they're everything like me, right? So that I think is what's underneath. That's what The Golden Theme is, is that recognition, because stories wouldn't work if that weren't true. For instance, if I say to you, I was walking on the beach and I was barefoot and there was hot sand between my toes. If I say that to you, the only way that you understand it is to put yourself there.

Ula Ojiaku

In your book, Invisible Ink, you also delved a little bit into the neuroscience, how our brains work and that our brains are wired for storytelling. When someone is telling a story and we're relating to it, the same parts of our brain are being kind of lit up and active, as if we were the people.

Brian McDonald

Because of the mirror neurons that we have. If you see somebody doing something, your brain does not know the difference between you doing it and them doing it, it doesn't recognise the difference and so the same part of your brain lights up. They'll show people smiling in a picture and have people in an MRI and the smile part of the brain lights up when that happens, and the frowns and all of that stuff. So that's a further proof of The Golden Theme, but also that's how we get the lesson from the story, because we put ourselves there, if we couldn't put ourselves there, we wouldn't get the lesson from the story and we wouldn't get the survival information. We would basically say, well, that happened to them and it would have nothing to do with you. And in fact, there are people like that, and we call those people, we will say, well, that guy, he's got to learn things the hard way. What does that mean? That means they don't listen to other people's stories, that's all it could mean. If there's a hard way, there's got to be an easy way, right?

Ula Ojiaku

The easy way is listening to people's stories and learning from them instead of you going through the experience.

Brian McDonald

Yeah, there's a saying that where there is an old person, nothing need go wrong. What that means is they have all the stories, so when there's a drought, go to them, they've been through five droughts. I think as we get older and our bodies fail and all of that, what we become is a collection of stories, and this is where we get the idea of that's where the wisdom is because that is what, before the internet, old people were the internet. That's the natural internet, the old people who have been through a lot and know things and have seen more patterns as you get older, you see more patterns, you're like, oh, I see where this is going to go.

Ula Ojiaku

And to be honest, you're not by any stretch old or anything, but one of the reasons I have this podcast is to hear people's stories and gather as much from people's experiences, to learn. So it's not really about posting it to the world, it's selfish, it's for me to ask questions of the people. So, like you said, people are a collection of stories, not necessarily just about the age, but just saying that's one of the reasons I want to hear your story. What happened? What made you do this? What made you do that? And I find myself, maybe let's see, tomorrow, a few weeks from now, I'll be like, oh, Brian said he went through this and I'm seeing something, I'm playing out and I'm instinctively knowing how it's going to play out, and then, oh, he said he did XYZ and okay, maybe I should try that and it works. Sorry, it's not about me, but I'm just saying I resonate with what you're saying.

Brian McDonald

It's just a very normal, natural thing, and I think it usually goes, it can go older to younger, but it can often go more experienced to less experienced, which is really the bigger thing. So I used to work with combat veterans that had PTSD, and I used to help them tell their stories to help with their healing, and I would ask them about storytelling in their work, and I'd say, okay, so you get deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq or something, are there stories before you go? And they were like, yes, there's lots of stories, because that's a highly dangerous situation, so people have a lot of stories about that. People who have been before say, make sure this happens, make sure you don't do this, make sure you do that. They said there’s stories when you're going, there’s stories when you get there, and there’s stories about when you're about to leave, because what I was told was, there are lots of incidents where people are on their last few days of deployment and that's when they get hurt or killed, because they get careless. So the stories are saying, be as careful on your last day as your first day, and that's just naturally happening. I think if people start paying attention now, often they're getting that kind of information, it changes how you hear stories, it changes how you listen to stories. There is this idea, this cliche, particularly in this culture, I don't know how many cultures have it, but in the United States, it's big and it's, oh, grandpa and his stories, or grandma and her stories, on and on and on, and blah, blah, blah with their stories. Here's the thing about that, they're just trying to help you survive. That's all that's happening, and if you listen, because you know, those people aren't going to be around forever and then you'll later, you go, why didn't I ask about this? Why didn't I ask about that? That's what happens. So just listen over and over again, even if you heard it 50 times, because there's going to be a time when you're going to want all those details, I guarantee you. If you listen that way, you listen differently. You start listening for how are they trying to help you survive, and it may not be apparent immediately. So I was in an improv class once and there was a woman in the improv class, Melissa was her name, and we're taking a break and we're having a talk and she used to be a flight attendant, and I said to her during this break, well, what was that like, and did anything weird ever happen on a plane or, you know, I was hoping she'd tell me about a UFO or something, but what she said was, well, she said a couple people died on flights I was on. She goes, that was a weird experience, but then she remembered something, and she said, oh, there was this one time there was a kid who kept getting up and running to the bathroom. She didn't say how old this kid was, but a young kid kept getting up, running to the bathroom and then coming back to his seat and then kept doing this, and he was annoying all the flight attendants, but Melissa said I was concerned. So I went up to the mother and I said, is your son okay, and the woman said, I think so, and she goes, well, I'm just concerned, he keeps getting up and going to the bathroom. And then she said, I noticed that his lips were a little swollen, and she said, I remembered a story that my parents had told me about my father having a fish allergy, where his lips swelled like that, his throat closed up, and he almost died. She said to the mother, is your son allergic to anything? And the mother said, I don't know. Melissa said, I think he might be having an allergic reaction. She checked the menu. They had served a salad that had shrimp in it. She said, I think this is what's happening. She's able to get on the phone from the plane to a clinic, they told her what to do, there was a doctor on the flight and when the plane landed, there was a team ready to help this kid. Now, when Melissa heard that story about her father, she did not think, here's information. She was just concerned about her father, but when she needed that information, that story was right there. We do that all the time. We just don't know we do it. It was right there. So even if you think this story is irrelevant, that this old person is telling me, you don't know that yet, it could be really relevant later on.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you for listening to Part 1 of our conversation with Brian McDonald. Be sure to tune in for Part 2, coming up soon. That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at [email protected] Take care and God bless.