Dan Harmon Circle

Dan harmon is the mastermind behind the story circle.

Dan harmon circle. Writer dan harmon the creator of tv s community has a reputation for being a story structure evangelist. The circles are everywhere if you know to look for them. It was popularized by writer dan harmon and explained in detail through the channel 101 wiki. The harmon circle is a method for describing story structure primarily derived from joseph campbell s monomyth.

Draw a circle and divide it in half vertically. By jason boyd jul 04 2020 dan harmon co creator of rick and morty has broken storytelling down to a science. They re on the whiteboards around dan harmon s office on sheets tacked to his walls on a notepad on the floor of his car. He story circle is a classic example of story structure and the hero s journey and its the reason filmmakers like steven spielberg and christopher nolan seem to consistently build great stories.

Who is dan harmon. He wanted to codify the storytelling process to find the structure powering movies and tv shows. For over a decade he s been known to break the stories he s working on with a system he known as the embryo the dan harmon story circle or just the story circle. Harmon has invented a storytelling framework referred to as the story circle 24 he began developing the technique in the late 90s while stuck on a screenplay.

Divide the circle again horizontally. Currently an executive producer at rick and morty he also created and ran the nbc show community. Using age old techniques of illustrating a heroic arc his story circle is not only practical he personally swears by the method and argues that nearly all stories share the same structure. Storytelling comes naturally to humans but since we live in an unnatural world we sometimes need a little help doing what we d naturally do.

Dan consolidated joseph campbell s classic hero s journey from 17 steps into a more contemporary set of 8.