Brian McDonald's Invisible Ink Guide to Story Hits Print

If you've ever wanted proof that Seattle has a mysterious success-retardant effect in publishing, the case of Invisible Ink should do the trick. Screenwriter and story structure teacher Brian McDonald, a long-time Capitol Hill resident and good friend of mine, wrote his guide to story back in 2003. Then he shopped the book around for seven years. He went to publishers with to-kill-for quotes like these:

If I manage to reach the summit of my next story it will be in no small part due to having read Invisible Ink. (Pixar's Andrew Stanton)

I recommend this fine handbook on craft to any writer, apprentice or professional, working in any genre or form. (Dr. Charles Johnson, National Book Award-winner)

I’ve sat down with at least a couple of dozen books that swore they could help me with my craft. Invisible Ink is the first one I’ve finished. (Aaron Elkins, Edgar Award-winner)

Not one publisher bit. There's a scene in The Family Guy, the first episode back from cancellation, where Peter lists all the other failed shows that Family Guy had to "make room for." It's hilarious, but also sad. (Have fun! Create your own shortlist of books published since 2003 that didn't need to be.)

But finally, Invisible Ink is available in paperback (Amazon, Barnes & Noble), and you can check out an online copy at Libertary.

It grew out of McDonald's classes on screenwriting and story around town, at 911 Media Arts and Richard Hugo House, and his ongoing work with the animation program at the University of Washington. A friend of his, who used to write for Seinfeld, wrote a pilot for a TV show of his own and asked for notes. When he got through with McDonald's comments, he said, "You should write a book."

It also grew out of the hard-knocks life of a Seattle screenwriter, applying to contests and fellowships, waiting to hear back, and unsealing, often, letters of rejection.

Brian McDonald

"I was trying to get into the Disney Fellowship program, and one of the rejection letters they sent back came with a list of books I should read," said McDonald. "I thought, I know all these books. I could write one of these books. So I did, partly out of anger. I had never written a book before so I didn't know how to do it. I just based it on my classes. It's what I teach at Pixar or Lucasfilm or wherever I happen to be." Pixar is having him down for a repeat visit this April, and a longer, four-week course.

The key structural concept McDonald tries to get across is what he calls "armature" (not exactly what's meant by theme) of the story. It's not the one-line synopsis, but the heart of what you're trying to say. This, not coincidentally, is what many, many writers struggle with putting into words. It's hard enough to do it with someone else's work, and that's multiplied when you look at your own.

For McDonald, deciphering the structure of story has been a lifelong process. Some kids take apart televisions to see what makes them go. McDonald used to tape (with a cassette recorder) the Bob Newhart Show, Twilight Zone, and Mary Tyler Moore Show to see what made them tick. "It took me a long time to distill that into armature," McDonald said.

Twilight Zone is remembered for Rod Serling's ability to recast the morality play ("the good guy gets something good, or bad guy gets his comeuppance") to include the paranoid tenor of the late '50s and early '60s. But "there's a bigger idea at work" in each episode, noted McDonald, "like we should respect each individual." That's the armature, it defines the story, it lets a writer gauge what's a relevant detail and what's not.

For McDonald, "it doesn't matter whether it's a joke or a newspaper story," the armature is what hearers, viewers, or readers rely on to make sense of a story. He's strict about it. Name the last movie you saw with a fully functioning armature, I asked him. There was a long pause. "Last year? Nothing comes to mind."

In Invisible Ink, he picks out The Wizard of Oz for special mention. He sums up that movie's armature as, "We all may have what we're looking for already," and then details how scene after scene after scene supports that argument. He gets impatient with today's writers, who "add extraneous things that don't reinforce their armature. You chip away anything that's not David. But they fall in love with a character or subplot and their point gets diluted."

Realism is not the addition of irrelevant details. McDonald recounts what Charles Johnson told him once. "When a child tells you a story, they say we got up and got dressed and went to the movie and got ice cream and went home. But stories are about 'because.' That's much more interesting than the 'ands'." He pauses. "There's a lot of 'ands' in the movies right now."

It's not that storytellers today fail to entertain at all. McDonald just thinks that "stories with strong armature entertain across cultures and across time. So, the long money is on armature."

I asked him to list his students' top three bad habits.

1. They write without having a point, without an armature, in the hope that one emerges. They hide behind their style. It's such a beautifully written sentence, they think, who cares if it doesn't say anything? What happens is, limping. People have a strong leg and a weak leg, they don't put any weight on the bad leg. But their stories limp because they favor their strength.
2. They try to impress other writers. A lot of writers write for critics or other writers rather than for a larger audience, they write to impress rather than to engage. Writers who engage (Michael Crichton, Stephen King) are thought of a cheap writers. But everyone would love to sell books in that volume, everyone wants people lined up around the block to see their movie. And critics tend to dismiss things that people enjoy.
3. They're too caught up with the goal to be original. That's really tied up in the first two issues. You just work really hard and learn to tell a story really well, I tell them. The thing that's original is the person who tells the story. Originality is an outcome of telling a story well and being honest to your experiences and perceptions.

So where do you get your armature ideas? "You can do both, find the idea in the situation, or the situation in the idea. Still, I can't start writing a story until I know why I'm writing the story. The trick is if you do it right, no one will know which came first. If you don't do it right [with an armature], your work will look mechanical and clunky. Without one, scenes meander, characters don't matter, and your story goes nowhere. Many times, the writer discovers the idea at the end and expects the audience to care."

McDonald keeps a running commentary of this sort on his  Invisible Ink blog. "The rules have gotten a bad rap, but mostly because someone uses the rules but executes them poorly. People say, 'I saw that ending coming a mile away,' or 'I've seen this character before.' But they tend not to point to classics."