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 ...