Dan Harmon Story Circles

By zachary kandell may 06 2020 rick and morty season 4 episode 6 never ricking morty features the story train a literal storytelling device strongly influenced by show creator dan harmon s story circles.

Dan harmon story circles. Currently an executive producer at rick and morty he also created and ran the nbc show community. Technically speaking the story circle is a story structure tool developed by writer dan harmon. In the late 1990s he was struggling with a screenplay and began to draw circles searching for a way to break the code of the storytelling process. Dan harmon is the mastermind behind the story circle.

Divide the circle again horizontally. 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. 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. He created it as a kind of a shortcut to building a story.

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. Draw a circle and divide it in half vertically. I was thinking there must be some symmetry to this he told wired referring to how stories are told. Dan harmon took that compaction even further.

Harmon s story circle is his attempt to remove all the hard and repeated work from the task of breaking a story his embryo allows him and the rest of the rick and morty writing staff to take. The dan harmon story circle. Starting from the 12 o clock position and going. In addition to rick and morty harmon is also well known for creating community and the podcasts harmontown and harmonquest.

Ginger takes us through how it works and how you can apply it to your own novel planning process. The circles are everywhere if you know to look for them. Go from pantster to plotter with this invaluable template for crafting your stories. Dan harmon s story circle adapts and broadens the tried and true hero s journey template to extend it for use with virtually any genre or story.

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.