![\"Scott](\"https:\/\/miro.medium.com\/fit\/c\/96\/96\/1*FOd2w7eFYOk0mYrS7ijv5Q.png\")
<\/div>\n<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
From the archives, a February 2012 post featuring Dan Harmon\u2019s \u2018circle theory\u2019 of Story. I\u2019ve updated it with a video featuring Joseph Campbell and the Hero\u2019s Journey and a detailed explanation of Harmon\u2019s take.<\/p>\n I suspect we have many fans of the TV series \u201cCommunity\u201d and \u201cRick and Morty\u201d, so my guess is there will be a lot of interest in this Wired article<\/a> featuring the show\u2019s creator Dan Harmon. It\u2019s a long piece so let me zero in on Harmon\u2019s approach to the story-crafting process:<\/p>\n The circles are everywhere<\/strong>, if you know to look for them. They\u2019re on the whiteboards around Dan Harmon\u2019s office, on sheets tacked to his walls, on a notepad on the floor of his car. Each one is hand-drawn and divided into quadrants with scribbled notes and numbers sprouting along the edges. They look like little targets.<\/p>\n Harmon, 38, is the creator of Community, a sitcom about a group of community-college study buddies and the most giddily experimental show on network TV. He began doodling the circles in the late \u201990s, while stuck on a screenplay. He wanted to codify the storytelling process \u2014 to find the hidden structure powering the movies and TV shows, even songs, he\u2019d been absorbing since he was a kid. \u201cI was thinking, there must be some symmetry to this,\u201d he says of how stories are told. \u201cSome simplicity.\u201d So he watched a lot of Die Hard<\/em>, boiled down a lot of Joseph Campbell, and came up with the circle, an algorithm that distills a narrative into eight steps:<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n 1. A character is in a zone of comfort<\/p>\n 2. But they want something<\/p>\n 3. They enter an unfamiliar situation<\/p>\n 4. Adapt to it <\/p>\n 5. Get what they wanted<\/p>\n 6. Pay a heavy price for it<\/p>\n 7. Then return to their familiar situation<\/p>\n 8. Having changed<\/p>\n Harmon calls his circles embryos \u2014 they contain all the elements needed for a satisfying story \u2014 and he uses them to map out nearly every turn on Community, from throwaway gags to entire seasons. If a plot doesn\u2019t follow these steps, the embryo is invalid, and he starts over. To this day, Harmon still studies each film and TV show he watches, searching for his algorithm underneath, checking to see if the theory is airtight. \u201cI can\u2019t not see that circle,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s tattooed on my brain.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cStar Wars,\u201d then sit-coms? That guy Joseph Campbell missed his calling! Should\u2019ve been a Hollywood writer. Here are a few versions of Campbell\u2019s \u2018circles\u2019. First, the 17 stages of The Hero\u2019s Journey as laid out in Campbell\u2019s book \u201cThe Hero With a Thousand Faces\u201d:<\/p>\n Here is another circle representation with a simplified 12-stage version:<\/p>\n And here is an even more basic version of The Hero\u2019s Journey:<\/p>\n There\u2019s value in each version and there are endless iterations, such as what Harmon has done with the show \u201cCommunity.\u201d From a screenwriting perspective, the goal is not to use The Hero\u2019s Journey as a formula. That just results in formulaic scripts. Rather it is to use these ideas as tools to dig into your story and find its soul, then<\/em> its structure. The plot should arise from the characters. Which sounds just like how Dan Harmon approaches his story-crafting process.<\/p>\n Here is a video which goes into detail explaining Harmon\u2019s circle theory:<\/p>\n For more of the article, go here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n
\n