Controlling Idea & Theme | Finding the Heart of Your Story to Overcome “Short Attention Spans”
How exactly do you move your story from boring, to interesting, to engaging?
Recently, in episode 21, I threw some common sense on the whole “short attention span” myth to help dislodge you from that false belief. The whole point was to explain that it’s not about attention spans getting shorter, we’re at a content saturation point and competition for attention is high. My advice was to focus on creating interesting, valuable content.
However, advising you to create something interesting and valuable is about as useful as bread with just a shell of crust. Without examining what makes something interesting, we won’t know HOW to do that. This episode is about how you can transform your content from a boring list of information into a powerful, meaningful human story.
And you do that by identifying your controlling idea and theme.
Defining the Controlling Idea & Theme
Way back in episode 11, I defined theme and controlling idea as a key element of a story, but it’s worth going over them again to understand their differences.
Controlling idea: the thoughts and beliefs the storyteller has about the topic that they're trying to convey to the audience. If you think about a story as an argument, your controlling idea is your hypothesis. It's what you're setting out to prove through your story.
Theme: the emotional core of your controlling idea. It’s the primal, human emotion or need underlying the controlling idea.
To get a better understanding, let’s look at these in a real-world example. One of my story clients is putting together a documentary about a ministry that rescues girls out of sex trafficking. For them, their topic, controlling idea and theme are the following:
Topic - Girls trapped in sex trafficking.
Controlling idea - Though sex trafficking is dark and terrible, God is still present, rescuing these girls from both physical and spiritual slavery.
Theme - Darkness/Light, Slavery/Freedom, Loss of Innocence/restoration of self
From Boring to Interesting to Engaging
Every message begins with the topic, the facts and necessary details. Because, ultimately, that's what you're doing. You're trying to give the audience a sense of what you're about.
But your topic is simply what’s on the surface. It’s information and lacking substance. What the brand storyteller must do is pull that information into an argument. As with any argument, you present it to the audience in the form of a hypothesis. You communicate to them your position, assumptions, and feelings about that topic and then set out to prove why that’s the case.
That’s exactly what your controlling idea is.
Now we've taken something that was boring on the surface, and we've made it interesting by crafting it into an argument. You’ve elevated your message from facts to feelings and given your audience a reason to care.
The way that you move from interesting to engaging is when you actually get at the emotional core of that controlling idea, which is the theme. That is how you truly engage people.
You can see that we’re adding emotional depth to our story as we identify what the story is truly about. Really what we're trying to map out with this is the spine of the story. Once you find your controlling idea, you’ve found your north.
Your theme will help you create the spine of your story, because now you know your argument. You understand what you're setting out to prove. And if you understand what you're setting out to prove, you can logically build that proof.
Now you're actually crafting this in an interesting way. And as the storyteller, you're leading the audience from one aha moment to the next.
This is why when you watch a television show, you end up just bingeing that show over an entire weekend. The story keeps you curious. It keeps you interested, pulling you in emotionally, getting emotionally invested. A story is an unraveling mystery. It takes you through twists and turns. As you learn new information, you’re presented with new questions.
That's what a cliffhanger is. A cliffhanger is the asking of a question at the end of an episode. In order to receive the answer, you must watch the next episode.
In essence, this is the momentum a story builds. Moving you back and forth between thesis\antithesis. Thesis/antithesis.
That’s how you make learning fun.
Finding the Emotional Core
The theme gets at the primal, unifying core of humanity.
For example, the movie “Moneyball,” starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, is one of my favorite movies. However, this film is about two of the most boring topics I can think of:
Baseball
Statistics
You literally can't numb my brain more trying to talk to me about statistics and baseball.
Why is this my favorite film?
Because it’s an incredible story about redemption, overcoming impossible odds, and solving a problem in a radically new way. And because it focuses on what is human and what is primal, the story transcends being about baseball. It becomes about a personal journey. And now it's something that I can relate to. For someone who hates baseball and statistics, it's easily one of my top ten films.
Don’t ignore this. The key to overcoming the attention span myth is finding the theme. It’s how you make what is apparently very boring very interesting.
For a marketer, this is difficult to do because it challenges the storyteller to upend their message. In order to resonate deeply with the audience, you must view your information as least important and prioritize the human story and the primal connection among all of us.
When you can get at the core of humanity, you've made something that's interesting beyond your core target audience. Because now you've created a human story.
Bear in mind, it's highly interesting to the core target audience because the topic is already of interest to them. But it’s now transcended the topic.
The other benefit of focusing on your theme is that the majority of our decisions are emotionally driven. Therefore, the more simple you can make that emotion, the more primal, the clearer you make the emotional core of your story, the more leverage your argument has.
Because it's not about what you're setting out to prove anymore. It's about that emotion.
Themes are Primal
What does the emotional core mean? What is a primal emotion?
I’m discussing your basic, timeless story themes. For example:
Light versus dark.
Life and death.
Security and vulnerability.
Slavery and freedom.
Defeat and victory.
I’m talking about primal human needs. Food, water, shelter, community, love, life, freedom, property, happiness, respect, etc. These are fundamental elements that make us a whole person. When we don't have them, we go into immediate crisis mode. That is primal.
When you can focus your story on what is primal, your story translates beyond your industry. You’ve created the potential for it to be “viral.”
I know the idea of transcending your industry and audience is almost antithetical to what is often preached in marketing circles. Even I recommend crafting a specific message for a specific person. I'm not ignoring any of that. Yes, you need a specific message for a specific person. You also need to guarantee that that person is going to hang with the message. And in weird way, by focusing on your theme, you're getting so specific that you transcend specificity.
You get so specific that you end up at the core of our humanity. That's going to connect with your audience and and resonate with them at a deeper level.
Themes Are Binary
You might be wondering why I presented the themes in pairs.
Remember, a story is a journey. Themes are binary because you're leading your audience from one emotional pole at the start of your story to another emotional pole at the end.
For example, if you need to communicate order, show the audience chaos. If you’ve been following my content for sometime, you’ll recognize this as creating an emotional delta.
It’s all part of building your argument.
In brand storytelling, for the most part, we're telling positive stories. So it's likely that you'll begin your story with the negative emotional value point of your theme, and end with the positive value expression. That transition, that global value shift, is what leaves your audience inspired.
Theme & Controlling Idea Focuses Your Message
The heart of your story gives you your heading. The theme is your story’s north. Without your emotional core, and without your central argument, you have a purposeless story. It meanders around, not really understanding what it should be doing, or what it should be (for that matter). It will lack focus.
Knowing your theme and controlling idea provides you with an Occam's razor. It’s a measure of what’s relevant or irrelevant to your story and message.
In my position, I continuously see people end up in one of two camps: artists or marketers. Artists, while they can easily make something beautiful or eye catching, tend to be poor storytellers because everything is precious to them. Clouded by their creative “vision”, they can’t see the story. On the other hand, marketers will have a heart attack if they don’t include every piece of information or value proposition. And both create boring content, because they have no sense of priority.
Knowing the theme helps you to focus your message and trim off all of the fat. What you're left with is a story where everything, every piece of information, and every creative decision, serves to reinforce your theme and your argument.
Your story becomes a highly powerful message that's leveraging repetition on multiple levels guarantee that your message is internalized by the audience. And they'll consume your entire message because they're engaged in the story.