In the Hero’s Journey, the hero will often refuse the call. Harmon compares this “need” section to the “call to adventure” in the Hero’s Journey. His inner need is to return to his fiance and overcome the hopelessness of his situation. In Castaway, Tom Hanks’ external need is to escape the desert island. You can also give your character an internal and external need. In Die Hard, John McClain’s need is to repair his broken marriage. Your character’s needs can also be internal. Maybe your hero is lost in the wilderness like in Castaway or The Edge. There is a need, something missing from your protagonist that they will spend most of the story trying to fulfill. What is your character’s zone of comfort?Īt this stage, you will show that not all is right in your character’s life.How will you make the audience feel for/ identify them? (hint: use pity).The bouncing can be effective, but if it’s going on for more than 25% of your total story, you’re going to lose the audience.” “Lots of modern stories bounce us from character to character in the beginning until we finally settle in some comfortable shoes. However, Harmon warns about shifting from character to character: The first character you show may not be your protagonist, and that’s fine. We can all identify with McClain’s anxiety, so we will naturally put ourselves in his shoes. Harmon uses the example of Die Hard. When we meet John McClain, he presents as a man on a plane afraid of flying. It’s essential to do this early because if your reader is not in a character’s point of view, then they are not in the story.Īn easy way to make your audience identify with your protagonist is to make us feel sorry for that character. Harmon claims that the best way to do this is to show your audience a character. In other words, you want to tell the audience who they are- YOU. In stage one, your job as a writer is to establish your protagonist. The Eight Stages of Dan Harmon’s Story Circle: Stage 1: A character is in their zone of comfort- YOU Watch Dan Harmon explain his Story Circle: You can find the archived post over at the Channel 101 Fandom page, and I’ll link the article at the bottom of this page. We’ll cover all eight stages of this story structure in-depth, but if you want a deep dive from the man himself, Harmon wrote a six-part series on the Story Circle for his Channel 101 blog. A character is in a zone of comfort – YOU Your end product should look like the image at the top of this article.Įach of these numbers represents a stage in your story. Number the quarters you’ve just created in order with numbers 2, 4, 6, 8. Number the right-hand side of the horizontal lined with a three and the left side with a seven. Place a five at the bottom of the circle, across from the one. Then number the circle starting at the top of the vertical line with the number one. Then draw a vertical and horizontal line that intersect in the middle of the circle. Visualize the Story Circle by drawing a circle on a sheet of paper or in your mind. It’s more complicated than that, but not by much! The character discovers a need and moves out of their comfort zone exciting things happen to them, they fulfill their need and arrive back at their comfort zone. They feel complex emotions and deal with things like legacy and ego, stuff that Harmon himself has to navigate while working in Hollywood.Harmon bases his story structure on the straightforward premise: all stories are circular. He made sure that these people changed with society. Both Rick and Morty had to be people deeper than just the surface level. and putting more effort into deconstructing his own circle to subvert audience expectations.Ī lot of time is spent developing characters. He works to challenge the way we absorb that show and the way he writes the show. He says his job is to take shows, no matter how crazy, as seriously as possible. These shifts in his mentality caused him to leave the network and thrive in animated series, as he did with Rick and Morty. He couldn't keep breaking stories about credit cards or haircuts when he wanted to tackle grandiose topics like "loneliness." He didn't love being the primetime showrunner of a network series, like Community. Harmon learned from these situations the hard way. He wants to demystify the process of storytelling and just sit and do the work until the best ideas flow forth from you. All of Harmon's work is trying to put Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey into layman's terms.
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