We Are All Storytellers, Revisited — Brian McDonald

[music] Hi, I'm Charlie Melcher, founder and director of the Future of Storytelling. Welcome back to the FAST podcast. Today we've chosen to re-release one of our favorite early episodes. This is my interview with Master Storyteller Brian McDonnell, who in addition to being a screenwriter, director, and teacher is the author of the essential books, invisible ink, the golden theme, and ink spots. Brian is also the chief storyteller at belief agency in Seattle and hosts the popular podcast, "You Are a Storyteller." It's always a treat talking shop with Brian. He's an expert on narrative structure and a deep thinker about the inner workings of stories. His books are required reading for new hires at Pixar and he's a regular teacher of storytelling at major studios like Disney, New Line Cinema, and Industrial Light and Magic. I've had the pleasure of personally working with Brian as he's a featured expert in the FAST curriculum, which we offer to companies around the globe to help educate their employees on storytelling in the digital age. Beyond all that, Brian is a remarkable human being, a personal mentor, and someone I'm proud to call a friend. So please join me in welcoming Brian McDonald to the FAST podcast. Welcome, Brian. It's great to be here with you today. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. Oh, thanks for having me, Charlie. So, Brian, you have been studying, living, breathing stories your entire life. Can you tell me why are stories important and where do they come from? Stories an interesting thing because I hear the word thrown around a lot. Most people don't have a working definition of story. So the definition of a story is stories are the telling or retelling of a series of events. That's a dictionary definition. I actually add to that definition leading to a conclusion, meaning having a point. But with stories are four, if you think about it, there's never been a culture anywhere in the world. Throughout time, throughout culture, there's never been anybody who, any group that hasn't told stories. So we all tell stories. Every one of us, every culture, every time. So if that's true, which it is, then it must have been selected for. Right? Right? The people who don't tell stories are not here. Right? So it must have been selected for. It must have been something we need it. And so I believe that stories exist to pass on survival information. There are a lot of clues to this. And one of them is that every writing teacher will tell you that stories need conflict. So looking at that for a long time, I realized that stories need conflict because conflict is the thing we need to learn how to survive. Right? So that's, they're inherently interesting because that's with conflict because that's what stories are for. So what's a good example of how stories help people to survive? So there's all kinds of survival, right? There's, there's cultural survival or emotional survival. A lot of 12 step programs, things like that are helpful for emotional survival. Right? So you hear somebody else's story or you tell your story and there's some emotional survival that happens there. So, so they're all kinds of survival. So don't don't get hung up on the on the physical nature of survival, but having said that, there are a couple of stories that that I that I like to to use to illustrate this idea. So, the problem is that big tsunami that was in Asia, was this now 10 years, maybe 12 years ago, whenever it was. I think it was 2004, right? The ones that hit in. Yeah, yeah, Asian tsunami. Yeah. So that tsunami. So there are these people called the Mokin. They, they have this story that's been passed down from generation to generation about what a tsunami looks like and how to avoid it. It's about seven waves and and in the story, there are these details like the the water will recede, which is what happens before a tsunami. And so they passed this down and during the tsunami, there's a 60 minute story where they interview one guy about it or an old man who was there who knew the story and warned everybody when he saw the saw the signs because he knew the story and they all headed up to higher ground and they all survived. No Mokin died during that. That's amazing because I think that that tsunami killed almost 230,000 people and you're saying that entire tribe survived because of the story that had been passed down orally through thousands of years of their traditions. Yeah. And I think that's what stories can do. And stories can give you the benefit of an experience without having to go through the experience yourself. We can all think about sort of stories in our own lives, things that our parents told us that we're kind of family lore that we that we've understood over the years. And we've got to be successful or survive in life. We've sort of established that stories are an evolutionary conceits or tool that help us learn things that keep us alive. Let me ask you this question. Do you think that everyone is a storyteller? I think everybody has to be. Yeah, I think everybody is a storyteller. Often when you say story, this is the other thing that happens when you say the word story or storyteller is that people automatically formalize it in some way. So they automatically think of a book maybe or they'll think of well storytelling. It's interesting. They often think children, child storytelling or they'll think tribal. But what they don't think is that every day when they're having conversations that they're telling stories any play any book anything it all comes really from just people talking to each other. You barely you can't really have a conversation without pretty quickly going into a story. And that's because stories are so memorable. It's because we connect to them emotionally. It's because they're how we we really learn right. You can't go through a day without seeking out stories of some kind. It might be a new story. It might be curling up with a book. It might be talking to friends. It might be watching a television show. But we can't not have stories. It's almost it's a steady diet. It's a constant thing with us. It's like breathing. Even when we're asleep, we tell story stories ourselves. Right. It never stops. And mine often wake me up in the middle of the night. So, um, so if everyone tells stories all the time. Are there certain things that people can learn to be better storytellers? Well, the problem is this pretty much everyone understands how to tell a story well until they sit down to write a story. And then everything they know goes out the window because they they choke a little bit and they they think it's got to be something different than what they do every day. And so I think everybody is a natural storyteller, but I think until they learn to listen for that in themselves and in other people, they won't quite understand the mechanics of a story. It's they're so natural to us. We don't think about it. So I've heard you talk about armature of a story. Uh-huh. Can you explain what that is and why it's important? I started working in film when I was a teenager, but when I started as an adult, I was working at a special effects house, a creature house, a creature shop where they made all kinds of this is the 80s, the mid 80s. And you know, they made all kinds of monsters and aliens and that kind of thing. And so I was the little person on the totem pole. I didn't do much of that kind of work. I did a little bit, but mostly I was kind of the go for person. And I would watch these sculptors make these little mockettes, little sculptures of, of whatever the creature was that was in that movie. And when they sculpted it, they had to put make a wireframe armature. Sometimes people make armatures out of, sometimes people make armatures out of wood or something, but there's also something called armature wire, which is just for this. So that's the one of the most important parts of the sculpture is that armature that skeleton that holds the clay up. Otherwise, it would collapse on itself. After sometimes a couple of hours, certainly in a day or two. And so it's one of the most important parts of the sculpture, but it's completely invisible to people. So that's what's going on here in your story and everything is built around that and that is the idea you're trying to communicate. So there are people who will get their backup about that because they think not all stories have a point, but they pretty much do. If you learned how to listen, you'll hear it. Often people will start their story with their point. It's just the way people talk. If you learn how to hear it, it doesn't sound like you're imposing something on a story by having a point. If somebody just starts talking and you don't know their point, it's pretty quickly you get bored or you get confused or you're like, "What am I supposed to be listening?" You know, I often hear people say, well, can a story be about mood, right? You know, can it be? It's like, well, first of all, that's not the way people talk. So that's a trick of literature. I think this mood idea. And here's what I mean. If I walked up to you on the street and I said, "Hey, Charlie, I guess I'm gonna tell you a clear blue sky, seagulls in the distance, the sound of waves crashing against the shore, hot sand beneath my toes, a cool breeze, kind of brushing over my skin." Okay, I'll see you later, Charlie. You would say that I didn't tell you anything. But if I said, "Hey, Charlie, my trip to Mexico was amazing." Clear blue skies, you know, all that same stuff, right? Now you know why you're listening. It changes it. Same details. And so, because you know what to listen for. - So what are some of the principles of a well-structured story? - How does somebody organize a story? - There's three major sort of pieces of a story. So you would have your proposal, you have your argument, and you have your conclusion, right? So your proposal is, and your proposal is also related to your armature, it's your armature. So your proposal might be, I wouldn't do business with that guy, right? That's your proposal. I wouldn't do business with that guy, what's your argument? Your argument is your story. Well, one time this, this, this, this, then I heard he blah, blah, blah, boom, boom, boom, right? And then, so your proposal, argument and conclusion, again, stories are often circular, you come back around to the beginning. Yeah, I wouldn't, I've already, I wouldn't do business with that guy, right? That's how you, that's how you do it. That's just how people speak. - So let's talk a little bit about storytelling today. It seems that there's a tremendous amount of dystopian storytelling. I was speaking to a friend who works at Scholastic, the publishing company that does a lot of children's books, and she was saying that almost all of their young adult fiction is dystopian. - Yeah, why do you think that is? - I have a friend who, she's actually a former student, G. Willow Wilson, who's a novelist in a comic book writer, and a graphic novelist, and she talks about millennials being taught all their lives, essentially that the world's gonna end, right? The global warming and all these things, right? And so, and so they've been taught this all their lives and so they're preparing for this emotionally, I think, and mentally, and I think she's right about that. I think there's part, that's part of it, right? Here we're living through a pandemic right now, as an example, right? That's gonna shape young people in a very specific way now, and they're gonna tell stories in a very specific way about how to survive things like this. I think that's part of it is that they are preparing for a world that they've been told is very dangerous for them, and they're not wrong about that. But often, I think they are getting rid of the hope, and I think that's dangerous. - They're losing hope, that's pretty profound. Do you think that the storyteller has any responsibility and he's sort of moral responsibility to put out stories that are more hopeful that can paint a picture that's a positive one of the future? I think that the storytellers' responsibility is to tell the truth. Look, the world's not all bad and it's not all good, right? So there's always some hope, and I think it's important to tell the truth about that, or there's always some good. One of the reasons I think that we gravitate towards somebody like Anne Frank is that she was able to even say that she thought there was goodness, right? That if she hadn't said that, I don't know if we'd be reading her story the same way. That becomes the lesson and that piece that becomes the armature of her piece that people are basically good. - Yeah, so now, I mean, it makes me think about some of the needs that we have in this time of social isolation and fear of the power of empathy in storytelling, and its ability to bring us together. Can you speak a little bit about that? And by the way, I happen to know that there's some parts of your own personal story that are very powerful around understanding empathy. - Mm-hmm. Well, that story cannot work without empathy. It can't work. So empathy is a major component in storytelling. And there are techniques you can do to make an audience empathize more with a character if you're telling the story or more with yourself if you're telling a story. And the more you can do that, the more resonance your story will have. - I watch just the other day, this your talk at the EG conference where you very powerfully told the story of your brother and his murderer, and it was an incredibly powerful personal story and really won about empathy building. First of all, I recommend to our listeners to look it up and go watch it. But would you mind sharing just a little bit of that personal story with us? - Yeah, sure. So in December of 2015, my brother was randomly murdered. He was walking down the street and had a confrontation that we're not sure exactly what it was about. It was a guy on the street, and then this guy pulls out a gun and shoots him and kills him. - What happened was I actually I got married shortly after that. The murder trial started when I was on my honeymoon so I would get these texts on my honeymoon about how the trial was going. And when I got back, I immediately went to the trial. So right from essentially, I mean, almost from the airport to the trial kind of, I mean, you know, that day the defendant was gonna take the stand. This woman who I didn't really know said something when she found out this guy was gonna take the stand that day and she said, now we get to hear how hard it is to be a crack dealer and she was really dismissive. And I thought, well, this is interesting. I thought, the first thing I thought was, well, I bet it is hard to be a crack dealer. That's actually the first thing I thought. And I thought, you know what, I'm gonna listen to this guy's story. I'm gonna just listen because I wanna understand this person who killed my brother. I need to understand him. If he was a terrible person, that would come out in the listening. If he was a good person or whatever, whatever, I don't know. So I just listened. And it turns out this guy was born into a gang. His family were gang members when he was born. His father goes to prison when he's young. His father ends up in prison. And his mother has all these kids and everything. And so what this guy does to help out his family is start selling drugs. Then he goes to prison for selling drugs. He decides when he's in prison, that he doesn't wanna go back to prison. Well, actually, while he's in prison, he learns a trade. But when he comes out, he's not hired. Nobody will hire him. There's a study that shows that a white man with a criminal record has an easier chance of getting a job than a black man with no criminal record. So here's a black man with a criminal record. So he can't, he learned this trade. It doesn't wanna go back to prison, but he's not hired. And that's legal, right? Well, you're felon. No, I'm not gonna hire you. But you can also be denied housing legally. You can also, and in fact, not only can you be denied housing, but you are not eligible for any government assistance, meaning you can't get food stamps, you can't get public housing. And if your parents or one of your relatives or something is in public housing, they can lose it if they put you up. So what does that mean? You throw somebody out on the street. They have no way to make a living. They have no place to live. What do you think they're going to do? So if you take all of that into account, what happened was I got very angry at the system and less angry at him. If the system had found a way to take care of him, this guy who shot my brother, my brother would be alive. So it was the empathy for this person who killed my brother in understanding his situation and also understanding that he was a person who was a person who was a person who was a person that although we didn't grow up in a gang situation, my brother and I grew up poor. So we were also victims of the same system, poor school district, all that stuff. And so it wasn't very hard for me to imagine a set of circumstances where my brother might have ended up on the other end of that gun. And if he had ended up on the other end of that gun, I would have wanted people to understand his humanity. And I thought if I would want that from my brother, then I have to extend it to this man. So that's what I did. So that's-- and stories help me do that. Incredibly powerful. And you are modeling the kind of learnings from stories that I guess we aspire and hope can come from powerful storytelling. That is stories that can actually help to change society. Yeah, stories change society all the time. Right. I saw a great example of this the other day when a woman from the CDC was on television. And rather than quoting just stats about how important it is that we protect ourselves so that we don't infect our families, she told a story of her grandmother and her great-grandmother and how her grandmother had exposed her great-grandmother to the Spanish flu. And her great-grandmother had died of it. And how her grandmother had to live her entire life with the guilt and knowledge that she was the cause of her mother's death. Yeah. And you can't hear that story and not feel the lesson of that story instantly. Right. And not only that, I tweeted about this the other day, but people, when they need stories, they understand exactly what they're for. When they need to communicate a powerful idea, they know they need stories. They do it all the time. All of us do it. And when we are looking actively to survive, we also know to seek out stories. So-- which is kind of a beautiful bring us back to the beginning. We're looking for those ancient wisdom stories like the Mokin had to help us figure out how to survive in a time of natural disaster. This is not a tsunami, but it's a pandemic. And likewise, we need to look back to our ancestors for that wisdom, for that survival information that can help us ride out this storm. Yeah. Exactly. If this happens again in 100 years, they're going to look back at us and see what we did and see what we didn't do. What did they do right? What did they do wrong? They're going to look at-- they're going to study this. The same way we're looking at 1918. Well, with that, I just wanted to thank you so much for being part of this podcast. And it's always such a pleasure to get to talk about stories with you, Brian. Thank you so much. Oh, thanks. Thanks for having me, Charlie. Thanks for asking me. It was fun. [MUSIC PLAYING] I'd like to express my heartfelt thanks to Brian McDonald for this enlightening conversation. If you enjoyed listening and would like to hear more, please subscribe to the FOSS podcast and share with a friend. You can also find a full transcript of this conversation and a selection of links to learn more about Brian and his work by visiting the URL in this episode's description. FOSS also produces a monthly newsletter that curates articles, upcoming events, and original content showcasing the cutting edge of storytelling. To join our community and subscribe to the newsletter, please visit fost.org/signup. The FOSS podcast is produced by Melt your Media in collaboration with our talented friends at charts and leisure. Thanks so much for listening. I hope you'll join us in two weeks for another discussion with a master storyteller. Until then, please be safe, be strong, and story on. [MUSIC PLAYING]