Grand by Charles Johnson

Author:Charles Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2020-02-26T13:07:44+00:00

5

Suffering Is Voluntary or Optional

My friend Seattle writer Brian McDonald tells a story that I know I will share with my grandson. It is a story about the tragic murder of his brother Brent in the early-morning hours on December 14, 2015. And it is about how Brian processed this personal loss.

As background for this story, you should know that McDonald is a superb teacher of storytelling techniques, particularly in the field of motion pictures. He is the author of two excellent books, Invisible Ink: A Practical Guide to Building Stories That Resonate and The Golden Theme: How to Make Your Writing Appeal to the Highest Common Denominator. McDonald has taught his story-structure seminars at Pixar, Disney Feature Animation, and Lucasfilm’s ILM. He is an award-winning director/writer who has written comic books and graphic novels, for A&E’s Hoarders, and has directed spots for Visa. His highly entertaining film White Face, which imagines what it would be like if circus clowns were a separate race, has run on HBO and Cinemax, and is used nationwide by corporations as a tool for diversity training. Presently, he holds the title of chief storyteller at Belief Agency in Seattle.

Some years ago I received an email from Brian that rocked me back in my chair and left me reeling. He said his brother Brent, an art teacher, had just been killed on a sidewalk in the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle. The shooting was random. The killer, a man named Richard Roundtree, didn’t know Brent and fired as they approached each other on the street. McDonald attended the trial of his brother’s killer. In a moving talk he gave, which is available online, he explains that when it was Roundtree’s time to take the stand, a woman he didn’t know said, “Great, now we get to hear again how hard it is to be a crack dealer.” Apparently, she recoiled at the prospect of listening to Brent’s killer, but McDonald says he wanted to hear this man’s story. Despite the pain he must have felt, he truly wanted to understand Roundtree, what his life and motives might have been, because Brian McDonald is, first and foremost, a storyteller, which means he is a student of characters, i.e., people and what makes them tick.

As McDonald listened to Roundtree, he learned that his brother’s killer was born in South Central LA into a gang family that helped found the Crips. When Roundtree was only six years old, his father went to prison for shooting a police officer during a robbery. Roundtree himself had been in prison for selling drugs to support his family. Naturally, he didn’t like prison, and so he apparently tried to learn a trade. But when he was released, he couldn’t find a job because he was a convicted felon. That led him back to selling drugs, and one night he was badly stabbed. According to Roundtree, he felt threatened when Brent McDonald came walking toward him and wouldn’t get out of the way.

“How,” McDonald asks in the video of his talk, “could I empathize with this guy?”

How, indeed.

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