Charles Johnson on "Digging Deep" into Your Craft

The Power of Simplicity

This week’s Story First Podcast is an archive episode from You Are a Storyteller, my old podcast co-hosted with Jesse Bryan. In this conversation, Jesse and I discuss the power of simplicity in storytelling and communication. We explore why people often mistake complexity for sophistication, why clarity matters, and why simplicity is usually much harder to achieve than clutter. One of the recurring ideas in my teaching is that strong storytelling is often about removing the unnecessary and communicating with precision. As Leonardo da Vinci said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Brian (BKO) O’Connell: The Art of Showing Up

This week on the Story First Podcast, Emmy-nominated director, storyboard artist, and filmmaker Brian Kalin O’Connell joins me for a deeply personal conversation about storytelling, artistic growth, and what it means to keep showing up for the work. Brian has worked at ILM, Lucasfilm, and Pixar, where he contributed to projects including The Clone Wars, Luca, Turning Red, Incredibles 2, and more. But this conversation isn’t really about credits. It’s about practice. As often happens on this show, the subject of lifelong learning comes up. Brian and I talk about the difference between fans and practitioners, the danger of surface-level thinking, the emotional truth behind storytelling, and why the best artists remain students for life. We also get into stop-motion animation, Ray Harryhausen, Charlie Chaplin, comic books, visual storytelling, style, vulnerability, fear, and the challenge of bringing your authentic self to the work.

Brian McDonald & Jesse Bryan: Storytelling and the Underworld

This week’s episode is an archive conversation from my old podcast You Are a Storyteller, co-hosted with Jesse Bryan. We recorded this discussion shortly before the release of my graphic novel Land of the Dead, illustrated by Toby Cypress. In this episode, Jesse and I explore many of the ideas found in the book, including the journey into the underworld, transformation through hardship, and the separate but related idea of “angels from the sky” — figures who enter the land of the dead and help others see things differently. We also discuss story structure in everyday life and the idea that storytelling begins not with books or movies, but with ordinary human conversation. Land of the Dead was later praised by Gene Luen Yang as “Brilliant. Indispensable advice for writers in particular and humans in general,” and by Charles Johnson as “Magnificent. A pleasure to read.” If you enjoy this episode, illustrator Toby Cypress has also been a guest on the podcast in a separate conversation about storytelling, comics, and art.

Christy Mandin - The Difference Between Taste and Craft

This week’s guest is author and illustrator Christy Mandin. Christy and I talk about storytelling as a natural human behavior—something people do every day without realizing it. We discuss picture books, visual storytelling, knowing what you want to say, observation, creativity, reviews, craft, and the difference between what people like and what is actually good. This ended up being a really thoughtful conversation about how stories work and why they matter.

Seeing Structure in Everyday Life

This week’s episode is an archive conversation from You Are a Storyteller, my earlier podcast cohosted by Jesse Bryan. In this episode, Jesse and I discuss story structure in real life—how the foundation of storytelling isn’t film, television, novels, or even theater. It’s ordinary human conversation. People naturally slip into story when they want to explain something, make a point, justify themselves, teach, warn, or connect emotionally. In fact, it’s almost impossible to have a real conversation without quickly moving into narrative. We talk about how storytelling is a completely natural human behavior, and how many of the principles of story construction can be learned simply by paying attention to the way people speak every day.