#dan harmon's story circle

[yaraaltrospace]

Which is your style: Storytelling Structure/Writing Method

I identify as a Snowflake Methodist on the long run. Glad to know there was a name for my type of writing, tbh

More info about each here

Tag your fellow writer/storymaker/lorebuilder/OC tale developer pals!

I tag for starters: @ultfreakme and @janethepegasus!

[djwaglmuffin]

Dan Harmon's Story Circle: Yea or Nay?

[secondarypuns]

A good way to frame this would be the Dan Harmon Story Circle, which uses three acts with eight story points, one more than the above seven act structure.

YOU: Establish the world, the character, what is comfortable for the character.

NEED: Establish the conflict. What does the character want changed? What goal do they have?

GO: It is at this point that the character's journey begins, they begin to pursue this change, and thus enter a new world; the unknown

SEARCH: Here, the character begins to encounter road blocks, trials. They need to adapt to this new world.

FIND: This is the part of the story where the character's hard work pays off and they finally get what they want...

TAKE: ...but not taken without consequences. Make your character pay a heavy price.

RETURN: The character returns home with new knowledge from their journey.

CHANGE: They do not return the same person, so show that change.

This method is primarily used for television writing, like with individual episodes, character arcs, entire seasons, or the whole show. The structure has been so useful that it can be used for any storytelling format.

I'll explain each point using the plot progression from the first How To Train Your Dragon movie.

Spoilers of course.

We are introduced to the world of Berk, to Hiccup, all the side characters, and the dragons.

Hiccup want to be like the other vikings, taking down dragons rather than being inside the forge. This problem is actually swiftly solved, but a new one emerges when Hiccup actually encounters Toothless and then frees him in the woods. Immediately after, hiccup is told that he would begin to participate in viking training. He begins to live in two different worlds.

First day of viking class, return to Toothless. It is at this point that Hiccup discovers why Toothless can't fly away, and then begins to devise a plan to help. He maintains keeping Toothless a secret from the rest of the vikings.

Hiccup learns a lot from being with Toothless, helping him to fly again, and he uses that knowledge to aid him in viking training, advancing far beyond his peers.

This amounts to two scenes in my opinion, the test drive scene, and the chance to prove himself in front of the entire village (which is something he didn't want any more, leading to point six).

He has unfortunately made an enemy of Astrid, who did eventually warm up to Toothless and dragons. Other roadblocks that begun to emerge were the discovery of the nest and Red Death, Toothless showing up when Hiccup was fighting the Monstrous Nightmare, his father, Stoick, realizing how Hiccup "befriended the enemy".

Almost the entire village leaves the island to take out the nest, underestimating the threat of the Red Death. Left behind are Hiccup and his peers. Of course, Hiccup cannot let his entire village die, so he gets everyone onto the dragons from the training arena, and they then fly to the nest, rescue Toothless, and help take out Red Death.

Hiccup wakes up in his home without a leg and with dragons all over his home. He and everyone around him has changed.

I find that the last two could have some details interchanged, but I hope I did a good enough job of explaining it!

the elusive 7 act Structure

[danglovely]

Look, I'm no creative writer (though I think I'm an excellent analytical writer). That said, I have never thought Harmon's story circle was all that good of a writing tool. I've heard him explain it and I've tried to look at the things he's written in the context of it, and it doesn't even seem like he uses it himself.

It's actually a tough thing to say, because I think it's inarguable that he's an excellent writer. Sarah Silverman understood that and still fired him for being impossible to work with.

[icetwinkluck]

actually writing full screenplays has made me realize I have a quite predictable story style :

person a is struggling in an unconventional way

person b wants them to do X thing to solve the struggle (has ulterior motives)

person a follows along because they have no other option even if the plan is bad/unclear

person a regrets decision/struggles with the plan even though it's moving forward

person a confronts person b/person c (who acts as an obstacle) in cruel self effacing way

escape/recovery

what they gained from experience

the joke is that this follows the dan harmon story circle

[feedthefandomfest]

this is far and away my favorite explanation of the story circle!! will schoder's videos in general are excellent

Writing Notes: The Story Circle

The Story Circle by Dan Harmon is a basic narrative structure that writers can use to structure and test their story ideas.

Telling stories is an inherently human thing, but how we structure the narrative separates a good story from a truly great one.

The Dan Harmon Story Circle describes the structure of a story in 3 acts and with 8 plot points, which are called steps.

When you have a protagonist who will progress through these, you have a basic character arc and the bare minimum of a story.

As a narrative structure, it is descriptive, not prescriptive, meaning it doesn’t tell you what to write, but how to tell the story.

The steps outline when the plot points occur and the order in which your hero completes their character development.

These 8 steps are:

You - A character is in their zone of comfort

Need - But they want something

Go! - So they enter an unfamiliar situation

Struggle - To which they have to adapt

Find - In order to get what they want

Suffer - Yet they have to make a sacrifice

Return - Before they return to their familiar situation

Change - Having changed fundamentally

The hero completes these steps in a circle in a clockwise direction, going from noon to midnight.

The top half of the circle and its two-quarters of the whole make up act one and act three, while the bottom half comprises the longer second act.

In their consecutive order, the Story Circle describes the 3 acts:

Act I: The order you know

Act II: Chaos (the upside-down)

Act III: The new order

Working with the Story Circle enables you to think about your main character and to plot from their emotional state.

The steps will automatically make your hero proactive as you focus on their motivation, their actions and the respective consequences.

Sources: 1 2 3 More On: Character Development, Plot Development

[writingquestionsanswered]

I remember back in school that they taught us how to write stories like a picture that looked like steps or a triangle where it would show the conflict, rising action, falling action, climax, etc. etc. So I wondered if you have found those methods to be effective or is there another way about it that you'd recommend?

Basic Story Structure

What you're talking about is very basic story structure, like this:

While this is certainly an effective way to understand how stories work at the simplest level, it's not great for showing all the plot points that happen in each of those sections.

If you're interested in a more in-depth story structure method or template, you can Google ones like Save the Cat Writes a Novel! to Larry Brooks Story Structure, Three-Act Story Structure, the Snowflake Method, The Hero's Journey, Blake Snyder's Beat Sheet, Derek Murphy's 24 Chapter Outline, Gwen Hayes' Romancing the Beat, Shawn Coyne's Story Grid, The Seven Point Plot Structure, Dan Harmon's Story Circle, The Five-Act Structure, James Scott Bell's A Disturbance and Two Doorways, Kishōtenketsu Structure, Story Spine.

The key with any story structure method or template is to know you don't have to follow them exactly. They're just a suggestion... like a suggested travel itinerary. You can follow it or you can augment it and work in some of your own stops along the way.

For more, head over to my Plot & Story Structure master list. :)

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

♦ Questions that violate my ask policies will be deleted! ♦ Please see my master list of top posts before asking ♦ Learn more about WQA here

[ourlordapollo]

Problem 1: I want to write the kinds of books I like to read, and these are often driven heavily by the relationships between characters, not the Looming Threat of Some Bad Guy, and I wasn't sure how to translate that

Problem 2: All the plotting advice ever written seems to assume you're either an aspiring romance novelist or that you want to write the next Star Wars

Problem 3: In pursuit of my goal, I have encountered many, many plotting methods that I only sort of grasped

Solution: I sat down with a guide to Dan Harmon's Story Circle, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, and K.M. Weiland's various blog entries, and synthesized them into a comprehensive plot wheel that I understand perfectly and makes NO MENTION of The Looming Threat of Some Bad Guy. It's color coded. Multiple people tried to armchair diagnose me with autism when I posted about this elsewhere. Can't imagine why.

Now I ramble:

I started with the Story Circle because I really thought I was gonna be doomed to writing Sherlock Holmes-esque short stories for the rest of my life, so I wanted to study TV format. It's fine, but it's a little vague. However, the way it talks about CHAOS vs ORDER and LIES vs TRUTH specifically, I found extremely helpful. The Story Circle's biggest influence on my wheel is all that highlighter and the words in boxes, as well as the words in all caps.

The other thing about the Story Circle is that it implies, by virtue of splitting up the Circle into perfect 8ths, that each section (YOU, NEED, GO, etc) takes up the exact same amount of story, which is not true

By contrast, Weiland divides stories into (roughly) 9 equal parts, thus assigning them all a spoke on the wheel (with the very first and very last part sharing a spoke, hence 9). That's why the wheel is divided evenly and the Story Circle sections are scattered unevenly across the circumference.

I called on Save the Cat the least for this enterprise because, after study, I found it the least helpful. I was able to marry each of its "beats" to one of Weiland's sections, and I used those descriptions to inform how I filled in that information. (For example, under 'renewed push,' Weiland is somewhat vague about what should happen, but STC includes suggestions for contrasting how the preceding plot point ended.

And there we have it! I can't say exactly how long this took me because I did most of it while on the clock at work. Maybe 8-12 hours? Not too bad at all because I already had comprehensive notes on everything.

[alexanderwales]

The Hero's Journey is Left as an Exercise to the Reader

I go back to Dan Harmon's story circle from time to time, mostly because it's just a really good way to structure a story. The hero starts in a place of comfort, has a need, enters an unfamiliar situation, adapts to it, gets what they wanted, pays a price, returns to the place of comfort, having changed. There, that gets you most of the way there.

What I've been finding interesting lately is how much of that basic structure you can leave off. There are eight steps in the story circle, which seems a little suspiciously convenient for dividing into octants.

You can for sure leave off starting in a place of (relative) comfort and simply imply it. All you need to do is start the story when the protagonist is already consumed by some need.

And you can also leave off the "need" part, starting the story when the hero is entering into the unfamiliar situation, leaving you to do vital character writing while they're in the middle of going into a deep dark pit.

Similarly, it's easy enough to cut from the "end" of the story circle. You can just imply that the protagonist returns to a place of comfort having changed, stopping right at the climax. In fact, you can probably leave off the 'pay a price' bit.

If we do all that, what are we left with? A protagonist adapts to an unfamiliar situation and gets what they wanted. That's two steps out of eight. Are these even essential though? At this point, I think I have to stop cutting and argue that they are.

A base example of this would be a man moving through a twisted cave, shirt filthy, slipping between gaps in the rock that take struggle and letting out all his breath at once to squeeze through. He pulls out his phone, shines the screen around like a flashlight, and finds a child's shoe laying on the cavern floor. He breathes a sigh of relief and picks the shoe up before going back the way he came.

When I write that out, I squint at it. Yes, we've elided a lot, but is this really down to just two steps? Have we done a good job of implying 'pay the price' rather than actually showing it, if the man is dirty and we've seen at least some of his struggle? Have we perhaps cut 'adapt' from this tiny story instead, on accident?

I generally think that the story circle method works best when you use the full thing, but I like to write long. I think there's an artistry to writing short that I would love to perfect, and part of it is cutting things down to the bone.

[duhragonball]

Roundabout

I watched CJ the X's video about Rick and Morty, mainly because I kept seeing people screencap the parts about perfectionism near the beginning. Well, I thought I should see it for myself, and then I wound up getting pulled into the "Story Circle" concept used by series co-creator Dan Harmon.

This may be old news to a lot of people-- in fact, I'm sure it is, because Harmon admits that this is heavily based on the monomyth concept popularized by Joseph Campbell. I've never fully appreciated the "Hero's Journey" idea before, but I think Harmon has refined it by simplifying the names of the steps. "Atonement with the Father" just becomes "Take", and that's a lot easier for me to grasp. Campbell probably never meant to suggest that every story features a literal "atonement with the father", but his work involved identifying common elements in story structure, so I'm sure he had trouble coming up with fitting names for everything.

Harmon's circle might be a little too simplified, since there's a lot to unpack in the word "Take", but his model is focused on making a formula to write new stories, as opposed to comparative mythology. What I like a lot about the Story Circle is that Harmon insists that it's not a rule that must be learned and followed. Rather, it's an observation of something all humans do when they tell stories, whether they realize it or not. But sometimes it can be helpful to be made aware of the pattern, like checking a map even when you're familiar with the route.

It can be fun, although probably distracting, to apply the circle to existing works. The Star Wars movies used Campbell's monomyth as a blueprint, so that's probably too easy. But it can also be used on individual scenes too. Luke(1) falls down a trap door and now he has to find a way back out (2) before the rancor eats him (3). He manages to avoid being eaten using a bone and some nooks and crannies in the pit (4) but at last he finds a door out of the dungeon, except it's locked, leaving him cornered (5). But he manages to drop a heavy gate on the rancor as it approaches him, which kills it (6). The bad guys then open the door to bring him back to Jabba (7), who now prepares to feed him to an even worse monster outside (8).

And that probably sets up the next cycle in the movie, where Luke saves everyone from the next monster, and so on. I think at long last I understand why these kinds of story structures are presented as "circles" or cycles". You don't have to do multiple laps, but the structure allows you to do so, and acknowledges that multiple cycles can also form a larger circle, and so on.

With episodic television series, the final step, change, often means reverting to the status quo. There's a M*A*S*H episode where Radar tries to become a serious writer, and he keeps trying to inject his army reports with purple prose, until finally Hawkeye explains to him that he has to use his own words and stop trying to imitate what he thinks the "pros" use. So Radar does learn a lesson, but the lesson basically puts an end to the weird dialogue he was using the whole episode and puts him back to normal. The Korean War doesn't end, and Colonel Potter doesn't die, and Klinger still wears dresses, but the structure is still followed and sets up the next cycle.

I can see how this is very useful in a writers' room for a television show, especially one like Rick and Morty, where the characters seem to be capable of almost anything. It probably helps to take stray ideas like "Rick turns himself into a pickle!" and run that through a formula to make sure you can get a working script out of the gag.

Anyway, I'm currently trying to use it to flesh out some ideas for my fanfic, since I have a lot of story beats I want to accomplish, but I don't have much to connect them together. Using the Story Circle seems to be helping me figure out which pieces I'm missing, so maybe this will compensate for all those years where I could just use DBZ Episode 66 and Xenoverse 1 as loose outlines that I could follow. This fall, I gotta build my own story skeleton before I can fill it in, and the clock is ticking...

[thesoftboiledegg]

"Rise of the Numbericons: The Movie" sounds like a wasted episode on paper: it's a ridiculous concept, it's a sequel that nobody asked for, and the two leads are a side character and a one-off cameo. In fact, it wasn't even a cameo. I had no idea that Dan Harmon voiced Ice-T in "Get Schwifty" until today. I thought the writers introduced Ice-T because he wanted to be on the show, but it was just a goofy pun.

But somehow, the writers balanced hip hop, action movies and outrageous antics without going overboard. "Rickdependence Spray" in season five is "going for it" gone wrong--a barely coherent mess that nearly everyone agrees is the worst episode in the show.

Conversely, "Rise of the Numbericons: The Movie" is pure entertainment. The jokes, digs at action movies and running gag that Water-T has no idea who Morty is are hilarious. Water-T's song at the end is actually catchy and the perfect soundtrack to the climax.

The fact that Ice-T voiced himself this time helped, too. Hugh Jackman's role in "How Poopy Got His Poop Back" would've been pointless namedropping if that weren't actually Hugh Jackman.

[Edit: Apparently, Ice-T only voiced Helium-Q? Damn, Dan Harmon nailed that impression.]

And man, everyone really is queer in the Rick and Morty universe! People call Morty the token straight character, but I think he's bi after his weird, unexplained obsession with Bruce Chutback in season five. Wish the series would say it outright, though.

Evidently, B-plots are a thing of the past. Some B-plots from earlier episodes are classic, but I also like one plot getting a full 20 minutes because it gives the leads more time to develop.

Speaking of leads, one issue I had is that Morty is overshadowed yet again. Rick has dominated seasons six and seven with little time for Morty. Sometimes, Jerry or Summer take his place. And now Morty's overshadowed by...Mr. Goldenfold and Water-T?

You could have edited him out and had virtually the same story. It's obvious that he's only present because people might not watch a Rick and Morty episode without at least half of the duo.

This episode did make me think about Dan Harmon's statement in 2022 that Rick and Morty could go on forever. You can do anything in a show with infinite dimensions to explore. Check in on old characters, develop existing relationships, travel to the craziest planets, make social commentary, see what Water-T's been up to, add another twist to Rick's lore--that one has limits, but a 70-year-old man has a long history.

Still, we've all watched THAT show that dragged on too long, declining so sharply that it almost ruins the classic episodes. People say that Superjail! ended too early, and it's even more lawless than Rick and Morty, but it took the viewer to bizarro land and ended before it went stale. Sometimes, enough is enough.

Rick says in "Promortyus" that he doesn't do sequels. However, after six seasons in total and four seasons that stubbornly refused to give fans what they want (not a bad thing, but fakeouts get old after a while), I think we've earned some follow-ups. It feels like the series is coming full circle as we gear up for the last 32 episodes.

But let's give Morty something to do! He has flaws, but he's the moral heart of the show. Without him, Rick would be a miserable old man in a house full of people trying to out-snark each other.

[regular-theodore]

"our daughter is fine" your son is writing in his faggy little notebook about dan harmons story circle

[laughingsquid]

Dan Harmon Applies His Often-Referenced Story Circle to the Primary Characters of 'Rick and Morty'