What Is A Controlling Idea?
Lesson from "Story" by Robert McKee
Think of your favorite novel.
What’s its theme?
. . .
Did your mind just take you back to high school English class?
Did you think of some broad term like love or justice?
Robert McKee argues that defining stories by a theme is too vague.
He opts to use a Controlling Idea.
Controlling Idea - A single sentence that describes how and why life undergoes change from one condition to another.
Ultimately, a story should be molded around one idea.
The more ideas you try to pack into a story, the more they implode upon themselves.
And you may end up actually saying nothing.
Examples of Controlling Ideas:
1984: “Tyranny prevails because of the suppression of individuality.”
A Christmas Carol: “Happiness fills our lives when we learn to love unconditionally.”
Sherlock Holmes: “Justice triumphs because the protagonist is more clever than the criminal.”
The Controlling Idea has two components: Value plus Cause.
Value - The primary value (in its positive or negative charge) that comes into the world or life of your characters as a result of the final action of the story.
A up-ending story like A Christmas Carol arcs the protagonist from a cynical man to someone who’s genuinely loving.
This prompts a positive phrase such as “Happiness fills our lives…”
In a down-ending story like 1984, the tyrannical regime still commands the story’s world by the end.
This prompts a negative phrase such as “Tyranny prevails…”
Cause - The primary reason that the life or world of the protagonist has turned to its positive or negative value.
A complex story may contain many forces for change, but generally one cause dominates the others.
Working back from the ending to the beginning, we trace the chief cause deep within the character, society, or environment that has brought this value into existence.
The Controlling Idea is:
The purest form of a story’s meaning
The how and why of change
The vision of life that readers carry away into their lives
This was a lesson from Story by Robert McKee.
You can read my full summary here:
