Episode Planning Masterclass

Organize Your Themes

Dealing with Organized Chaos

Let's talk about those buckets.

Each bucket has a title and that title is one of your themes. Having a themed filled bucket is like finding a treasure chest filled with gold – only the gold is your notes! Each theme is a potential story with a beginning, middle, and end, just waiting to be uncovered.

When you created those buckets you were actually creating conversation starters by filling them with juicy details. However, each of your buckets is a jumbled mess not unlike what you find when you open a puzzle box for the first time. Only it’s a puzzle bucket!

Your goal now is to dump out each puzzle bucket and figure out how your notes all fit together to tell a story.

Finding Buckets Within Buckets

You begin this organization process by picking a bucket and sorting it by deciding which notes represent the beginning, middle, and end of the themed story. It doesn’t sound complicated because it’s not technically difficult. However, it is time-consuming.

Additionally, while you go through each bucket you will find that the theme is an epic theme that includes several smaller themes. That’s okay. The process is designed for you to make these discoveries. If you find that you have an overwhelming amount of notes that create multiple smaller themes then you can do one of two things:

• Turn all the smaller themes into new theme buckets
• Keep the epic theme and add sub-themes under it

By turning all the smaller themes into new theme buckets you eliminate the need to nest story ideas under an overarching theme. This keeps your organization clean and reduces any unnecessary hierarchies. It also allows each story theme to stand on its own.

If you, however, decide to keep the epic theme and add sub-themes under it, you can use the epic theme as the basis to tell a whole series of similar stories in a row. Some podcasts look for these epic themes to tell a bigger story in an episodic format. Investigative journalists and True Crime podcasts are famous for this type of storytelling.

Again, I remind you that this is your show and there is no right or wrong way to organize your themed buckets.

Pick a style and start sorting!

Turning Buckets into Stories

Each themed bucket will present you with the challenge of figuring out what the best beginning, middle, and end of the story should be. Here are some insights to consider while you are sorting:

• Tell the story as if you were telling a friend
• Look for ideas that define the main theme
• Walk the plot points to their natural conclusion
• Don’t get fancy until you have the entire story
• Note the gaps that will require further research
• Decide early if you have one or many stories
• Do not focus on story length

Group your themed bucket in any way you think it makes sense to you and that would make sense to your target audience. You know who you're talking to.

To complete the organization of all your themed buckets takes time. Is this hard work? Oh, you’re damn right it is! This is very hard work because like patterns, organizing your themes will take time. However, the intimate knowledge you gain from this process is invaluable. Keep going!

Story Summaries

With each themed bucket you organize you need to summarize your findings. What did you learn? Is the story complete? Does it have a beginning, middle, and end? If all of these questions can be answered then you need to write down what this story is before you move onto the next bucket.

A summary doesn’t need to be anything in-depth. Just 3-5 sentences that communicate the core idea of the story and a few of its critical plot points. The reason you do this is to capture your thinking at the time you organize the bucket and to keep you from having to dig through all your notes again to figure out what this story was.

Place these summaries at the top of all your newly organized notes and keep a separate document that contains only bucket titles and summaries. This will become a type of cheat sheet you can use in future lessons.

When you finish organizing your buckets you will be ready for the next lesson!