Eight steps around a circle
Dan Harmon, who created the sitcom Community and co-created Rick and Morty, draws his steps round a circle and gives each one a single word. The short names are his. The explanations are ours.
- You. Someone in a situation they know, comfortable or at least familiar. A few lines are enough to show who they are and how they get by.
- Need. Something is missing and they want it. The want gets the story moving, and there is often a deeper need underneath that the character can't see yet.
- Go. To get it, they have to leave the familiar for something they don't know: a place, a plan, a lie, a role they have never played.
- Search. Out of their depth, they work out how the new situation operates, and usually get it wrong before they get it right.
- Find. They get what they wanted, or what they came looking for. It is seldom what they expected.
- Take. It costs them. Something is lost, given up or broken, and this is often the most painful moment in the story.
- Return. They head back towards the familiar, carrying what they found and what it cost.
- Change. Back where they began, they are no longer who they were, and the situation from step 1 looks different because of it.
The circle as a clock
Harmon draws the steps clockwise, like the hours on a clock face. Step 1 is at twelve o'clock and step 5 directly opposite at six. A horizontal line through three and nine o'clock cuts the circle in two, and steps 3 and 7 sit on that line, because they are the moments the character crosses it.
| Step | On the clock | Half of the circle |
|---|---|---|
| 1. You | 12 o'clock | Top |
| 2. Need | half past one | Top |
| 3. Go | 3 o'clock | Crossing down |
| 4. Search | half past four | Bottom |
| 5. Find | 6 o'clock | Bottom |
| 6. Take | half past seven | Bottom |
| 7. Return | 9 o'clock | Crossing up |
| 8. Change | half past ten | Top |
The top half is usually labelled order: the known world, where the character is in control. The bottom half is chaos, the unknown, where they aren't. Harmon has said that order and chaos is the generic split, a pair that fits almost any story, and in answers on his blog he suggests finding a sharper pair for each one, a contrast that matters to this particular character. He then adds a vertical line with a second pair, which gives four quarters for the character to pass through.
Reading across the circle is another check. Each step faces one other, 1 and 5, 2 and 6, 3 and 7, 4 and 8, and the two in each pair should answer each other: the comfortable world and what is found at the bottom, the want and its price, the struggle to adapt and the change it leaves behind. When a pair has nothing to do with each other, that is often where a draft is thin.
Where it comes from
The circle is Harmon's simplification of Joseph Campbell's monomyth, the pattern behind the hero's journey. Campbell's seventeen stages already ran in a loop, out of the everyday world and back into it. Harmon kept the loop and brought the stages down to eight.
He set it down during his years at Channel 101, the monthly screening night he started in Los Angeles with Rob Schrab in the early 2000s. Short pilots of five minutes or less were shown there, and the audience voted on which ones came back with another episode. Harmon wrote up the circle in a series of tutorials for the people making those films, and he has gone on explaining and adjusting it on his blog and in interviews. He has since used it in the writers' rooms of his own shows.
Why it suits episodes and short films
The circle closes. A character leaves the familiar, is changed by what happens, and comes back, so the end of the story meets its beginning. Episodic television depends on exactly that: next week the characters need to be in their usual places, with a little of what they learned still showing. A 22-minute comedy can turn the whole circle once in its main storyline, and the shape keeps it from drifting.
Short films benefit for a similar reason. Eight steps is about as much structure as ten pages can carry, and each step can be a scene or less. Harmon was writing for five-minute pilots when he set the circle out, and it still holds at that scale.
Three-act structure tells you where the turns go but leaves their nature to you. The circle names them, as a crossing, a finding, a cost and a way back, and for a writer with ten pages to fill that is often the more useful help.
A worked example: Midnight, Pacific Time
Midnight, Pacific Time is the four-page script from our guide to screenplay format. Maya Ellis, a screenwriter in London, has until eight in the morning to send her script to a contest in Los Angeles, and at 1:40 a.m. it is written but nowhere near formatted. For her circle, the top half is Maya among her family and the bottom half is Maya alone with the page.
| Step | In the script |
|---|---|
| 1. You | The kitchen at 1:40 a.m. Maya at the laptop, her brother Leo wrapped in a duvet and reading over her shoulder, two clocks on the fridge. |
| 2. Need | The deadline is midnight in Los Angeles, eight o'clock in London. She wants the script formatted and sent before then. |
| 3. Go | Leo takes the teapot and goes to bed. Alone, Maya scrolls back to page one, and the voice of her old teacher, Mr. Brennan, reminds her that readers judge a script on its first page. |
| 4. Search | The flashback to his classroom, then the montage: speeches pulled into the dialogue column, three spellings of one name cut to one, nine CUT TOs deleted. |
| 5. Find | The page count falls from 131 to 117. The script looks like a script. |
| 6. Take | She wakes at 6:40 with her head on her arms. The night has cost her sleep and most of her time, and the hard part, letting the script go, is still ahead of her. |
| 7. Return | Her grandmother Rosa rings from Madrid and pulls her back into the family. Rosa's husband wrote letters to the newspaper for forty years and never sent one on time. "Send yours." |
| 8. Change | At 7:52, with minutes to spare, Maya uploads the PDF and lies down on the kitchen floor. |
Maya's want at step 2 is a formatted script, and by step 5 she has one. The price at step 6 shows what the story is really about. Maya can fix a script; letting one go is what she finds hard, and her grandmother puts that into words at step 7. Both crossings are people, too. Leo leaving the room takes her down into the night's work, and Rosa's call brings her back up.
The same circle on Low Tide
For Low Tide, the 12-page sample project in Scriptopus, there is a sharper pair than order and chaos. The top half is the story Mara Welles has told herself about her family for thirteen years. The bottom half is what really happened.
| Step | Pages | In Low Tide |
|---|---|---|
| 1. You | 1 | Mara, a sound recordist, records the sea from the coast road. When her mother's voice comes up on an old tape she switches it off. She handles feeling by recording it. |
| 2. Need | 1 to 2 | She wants one last recording of her mother's cottage before the keys are handed over at sundown. |
| 3. Go | 2 to 4 | Her father, Des, is in the house. She stays, and the past she has kept at arm's length is in the next room. |
| 4. Search | 4 to 6 | Packing side by side, a box of school things, small truces that don't hold. On the beach at low tide she accuses him, and he walks away without answering. |
| 5. Find | 7 to 8 | A key taped under her mother's desk, a locked drawer, letters never sent and a dozen numbered cassettes. Tape one, in her mother's voice. |
| 6. Take | 8 | The truth costs her the villain. Her mother chose to hide her illness, Des kept his promise to keep Mara away, and the father Mara has blamed for thirteen years did what he was asked. |
| 7. Return | 9 | On the porch step, as the tide turns, she admits her own part. They laugh, which neither of them expected. |
| 8. Change | 10 to 12 | She points her microphone at her father and asks him for a story about her mother, then drives the coast road the other way with his voice playing over the sea. |
Her microphone opens and closes the circle. At step 1 she points it at the sea to avoid a voice, and at step 8 she points it at her father to keep one. Steps 1 and 5 face each other as well: the tape she switches off on the first page is answered by the tape she plays at the bottom of the circle.
A and B stories in one episode
Most television episodes run two or three storylines at once, and each can have a circle of its own. The A story carries the episode. The B story is smaller, often lighter, and usually belongs to someone else. They work best when the circles touch, so that one story's price lands on the other, or a find in one becomes a problem in the other.
The pilot of The Night Desk, the original series in our series bible guide, shows how. Nora Quinn is the night editor of the Meridian, a failing London newspaper, Sam Okafor a 25-year-old reporter on her shift, and Felix Hart the paper's owner. The A story is Nora's and the B story is Sam's.
| Step | A story: Nora | B story: Sam |
|---|---|---|
| 1. You | The day staff have gone home, and the night desk is running the way Nora likes it. | Sam's first night shift. He came from a news site that closed under him and has never had a front page. |
| 2. Need | A caretaker rings the night desk with fire-safety reports for a block of council flats, signed by inspectors who never visited. | Nora tells him the front page is his if he gets a resident on the record. |
| 3. Go | Nora leaves the building for the first time in a year, to meet the caretaker at an all-night café. | Sent out to the flats in the rain, he talks his way in past the locked entrance. |
| 4. Search | The caretaker panics and takes back half of what he said. She pieces the rest together from the council's own papers. | Nobody will open a door to him. He waits on the stairs for the night workers coming home. |
| 5. Find | By eleven the documents line up, and the story stands. | A nurse on the ninth floor tells him, on the record, that the fire doors have never closed. |
| 6. Take | At half past eleven Felix kills the story, because the developer is an old friend. | His front page dies with it. |
| 7. Return | At one in the morning Nora takes a second phone from the lining of her coat and calls the Lantern, the rival paper. | Back at the office he asks Nora what happened. She tells him the lawyers got nervous. |
| 8. Change | By breakfast the story is on the Lantern's front page, and Nora's secret has grown. | Sam finds his nurse's words in the Lantern, and Felix gives him the job of finding the leak. |
The two circles share their sixth step, since one decision by the owner is the price in both. The B story's change also reaches past the episode. Felix has asked Sam to find the leak without knowing he is asking him to find Nora, and the season can build on that.
The circle beside three acts and the hero's journey
The three models describe much the same shape, and the steps line up roughly as below. Different writers draw the lines a step earlier or later.
| Story circle | Hero's journey | Three acts |
|---|---|---|
| 1. You | Ordinary World | Set-up |
| 2. Need | Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call | Inciting incident |
| 3. Go | Meeting with the Mentor, Crossing the First Threshold | First plot point, the end of Act One |
| 4. Search | Tests, Allies and Enemies; Approach to the Inmost Cave | First half of Act Two |
| 5. Find | The Ordeal, Reward | Midpoint |
| 6. Take | The cost of the reward, and the Road Back | Second half of Act Two, down to the low point |
| 7. Return | Resurrection | Second plot point, Act Three and the climax |
| 8. Change | Return with the Elixir | Resolution |
What the circle adds is a step of its own for the price. In three-act terms the cost is folded into the low point, and in the hero's journey it is spread across the ordeal and the road back. Giving it a number makes it hard to skip.
In ScriptopusDan Harmon Story Circle is one of the structures the Beat Board offers before you start, with its eight stages named You (Comfort), Need, Go (Cross Threshold), Search, Find, Take (Price), Return and Change. Each stage becomes a sequence on the board with a share of your runtime. In Story Canvas, the Structure panel lays the eight stages out as a loop, with the last joined back to the first. A free account has both.
Where the circle runs out
- Eight points are few for a feature. Over a hundred pages each step becomes a long stretch with ups and downs of its own. Many writers draw a smaller circle inside each step, or one for each sequence, so the big circle doesn't go slack.
- It follows one character. The circle tracks a change in a single person. An ensemble needs a circle for each lead, and the model has nothing to say about where those circles should meet.
- Some stories shouldn't come home. Tragedies, serials that end on a cliffhanger and stories of exile break the loop on purpose.
- Order and chaos can flatten everything. If every circle uses the same two halves, every story starts to feel like the same story. Harmon's suggestion of a sharper pair for each story helps here.
Download the story circle sheet
The circle drawn as a clock, with a box at each of the eight steps and space to name your own top and bottom halves. A second page sets the steps out as rows, with a column for an A story and one for a B story.
Fill it in on screen
The same sheet as a Word file, which Pages and Google Docs also open.
Questions
Is the story circle the same as the hero's journey?
It is the same pattern in a smaller frame. Campbell needed seventeen stages to get his hero out of the everyday world and back; Harmon does it in eight. Our hero's journey page has the twelve-stage version most screenwriters use.
Does the character have to change?
Something has to, though it can be small. In a sitcom, the change at step 8 may be a lesson learned for one episode and forgotten by the next. If nothing changes at all, the circle has turned without the story going anywhere.
How long should each step be?
There is no fixed share. In Low Tide, steps 4 and 5 take up nearly half the pages and step 6 happens in a single scene. Draw the circle first, then see where the story wants to spend its time.
Can I use it for a feature film?
Yes, usually with smaller circles inside the big one to keep the long middle moving, and three acts beside it to check the proportions.
Sources and further reading
- Dan Harmon, answers on his blog (August 2013), on breaking a story with the circle and choosing the halves, with a Community episode as the example.
- Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), the monomyth the circle simplifies.
- Midnight, Pacific Time, the example script from our guide to screenplay format, as a Fountain file.
Write it formatted from the first line
Scriptopus sets every line as you type, keeps the beat board and the treatment beside the script, and exports the PDF and Final Draft file you will need. The editor is free on Mac and Windows.
- Every element in its place, with Tab, Enter and Ctrl+1 to 6.
- Beat Board, Treatment and Synopsis in the same project as the script.
- Six title page layouts, Industry Standard first.
- PDF, Final Draft, Fountain and Celtx exports.