A few years ago, when this project was only a few random notes I’d been collecting on my phone, I read Joseph Campbell’s – a hero of a thousand faces, as soon as I was finished I started again. This book was like a light bulb for me, I just didn’t know what the light was for at the time, but here were are some 5 years later and it makes a lot more sense,
A hero of a thousand faces takes a look at many different stories, fables, legends from almost every country, culture, and religion, and the shocking similarity between all of them, humans have always told stories, but in reality, we’re just retelling the same stories over and over.
The monomyth
This realization is amazing what a weight off, turns out I couldn’t come up with a new story if I tried and it doesn’t matter because people don’t like new stories anyway. Every story we tell at its most basic level is a story describing the human experience, seems simple enough, I’m human, I’ve had experiences!
Not only do all these stories follow the 3 act structure Joseph Campbell’s outline a much more detailed structure which they all follow. The description he gives of each stage is somewhat metaphorical and a bit difficult to adapt.
This is where Dan Harmon’s Story Circle comes in, he’s identified Joesph Campbell’s key point and modernised them to brake the story down to even fewer- 8 steps story circle
- You – Establish the protagonist
- Need – Something isn’t right you have a Need
- Go – Cross a threshold
- Search – The road of trails
- Find – Meeting the goddess
- Take – Pay the price
- Return – Bring it home
- Changed – Master of both worlds
For a full explanation of Dan Harmon’s story circle check out these posts written by the man himself https://channel101.fandom.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_Basic_Shit
Finally, after a lot of reading and research (youtube) for my own understanding and future reference I combined my favourite parts of each story structure I’d found. Here’s my story circle description.
- The character lives in an imperfect situation in a normal world
- They have a want or desire that conflicts with their reality, (they believe a lie which is often that if they get the thing they want they’ll be happy)
- They do something about it, they take action and go outside of their comfort zone leaving the “normal world”
- They search for their want and faces a series of trails. their expectations about the want are challenged
- Find the thing they wanted
- Take the object of desire and pay an unexpected cost
- Return to the normal world
- Having changed from the experience
One of the reasons I like the circle so much is it can be applied to so many parts of the story, not only is it a good structure for an episode it’s also a good structure for the whole season or even a scene. I’ve built the first season with this structure so I’ll have 8 episodes per season, each in one way or another for filling its corresponding story beat for the season as a whole.
The cyclical nature of an episodic narrative relies much more heavily on the last story beat, the return home. The characters still change and learn but only just enough to get back to where they started.
Just like us, we’re never finished after one adventure. In the final part of this 3 part story Structure mega-post, I’ll talk about how I visualize Story Structure.
If you tell stories or just consume them, what is it that makes a good story a great story? Let me know in the comment below 👇