Oncetold - Tell Your Story

Thinning the Herd

Select 12 Buckets

So, you've got these buckets brimming with themes, right? Now, what's the next move? Well, buckle up, because we're about to get strategic. You're gonna take each of these themes and make sure they're packing at least four topics each. If any of them fall short, they get relegated to the back of the line. We're looking for the heavy hitters here—the themes that have the most notes piled into them. Sure, you might have to break some of them down, but chances are if you put in the work you're looking at a laundry list of themes, maybe 20 or 30 themes to consider.

Rank Your Buckets

Once you’ve sorted all your buckets to only look at the ones with four or more topics, you should have a very good idea of which theme buckets contain stories that resonate with you.

With that in mind, I want you to take your cheat sheet and start ranking those stories. Identify the stories that you want to tell the most and place them at the top of your list. This will force you to move the more complex or less interesting stories toward the bottom of your list.

If you need to group your stories by epic themes, this would be a good way to decide which order the smaller themes go within each epic.

When you finish ordering your list you will be ready to move on!

Organize your Final 12 Themes

Next, you're gonna sift through those themes and pick out the themes that include topics, stories, notes, and tales that:

Force you to want to know more
Flow seamlessly from one story to the next
Have a natural progression or mystery that builds
Have meta-themes that could weave unrelated stories together

The goal is to handpick 12 themes you cannot wait to share with your future audience. Only 12 – No more, no less. And 13 is right out!

Now, I know what you're thinking, why 12 themes? Simple: 12 themes get you one theme for every month of the year. By selecting 12 strong themes that resonate with you, you allow yourself the opportunity to focus your limited time and resources on only one theme a month throughout the year.

When finished, you should have 12 themes picked out for all your themes.

Narrowing Your Lens

I decided to focus on the Escaping Disaster perspective within my Survivor Stories direction. The Escaping Disaster perspective means just that: the person in the story had to survive the disaster! They had to make it back for it to be something worthy of The AnonyMoose Files.

By narrowing my lens on the Escaping Disaster perspective, I force each topic to tell the beginning, middle, and end of a story where the person involved found a way to survive.

Now, let’s put that idea into practice!

Organizing My Themes

With my direction and perspective guiding my decision, I use a chart to organize my target themes. You can use sticky notes, paper with a line down the middle, or simply numbering your folders, whatever process works for you.

To work the chart, I start going through all the research I’ve done up to this point. Then, in the first two columns, I put the themes that are in focus on the left and everything else (out of focus) on the right. Yes, there may have been themes you researched at the beginning that no longer match what you have in mind for the direction of the show. This is where you weed those suckers out!

The idea is to stick to your guns on each of the decisions you make. You might have all kinds of themes that match your direction – survival stories, disaster escapes, wilderness survival – but which ones are the best match for my direction and perspective?

Here's an example of how I could organize my themes for The AnonyMoose Files: