Harmon’s circle and the critique of the hero’s journey

The story circle is Dan Harmon’s eight-step version of the hero’s journey: a hero wants something, goes into the unknown, pays for it and returns changed.

Eight steps instead of twelve

Dan Harmon, a TV writer and the creator of Community and Rick and Morty, developed his own simplification of the hero’s journey while he was struggling with scripts, and later wrote it up for the Channel 101 community he co-founded. He cut the pattern down to eight steps arranged in a circle. We retell them in our own words, using the labels people commonly give them:

1. You. The hero in a zone of comfort.
2. Need. They want something.
3. Go. They enter an unfamiliar situation.
4. Search. They adapt, and look around.
5. Find. They get what they wanted.
6. Take. Getting it costs them dearly.
7. Return. They go back to where they began.
8. Change. They are back, and changed.

A horizontal line cuts the circle. Above it is the familiar, below it the unknown. On step three the hero goes below the line, and on step seven they come back up. Harmon likes the circle because it can be tested with questions: “What does the hero want? What stands in the way? How does it end?” If any step has no answer, the story has a hole in it.

Try it on the diagram. Press the steps and see which place in Vogler’s journey each roughly matches, and which question to ask about your visitor.

Harmon’s circle Three shapes

1. You. The hero in their comfort zone.

In Vogler’s journey this roughly matches: Ordinary world.

A question about your visitor: Who is this person, and what does an ordinary day look like for them?

Back Next

Above the line is the familiar, below it the unknown. Steps 3 and 7 are the crossings: going down, and coming back up.

Check yourself: which step of the circle is the most “expensive” for the hero?

The sixth, “take”: having got what they wanted, the hero pays for it. Without that step a story reads like an advertisement in which everything comes free.

When the circle helps

The circle is especially good in two cases.

• When you need to sketch a client’s story fast. Eight lines take an hour. Twelve steps are heavier.
• When you need to find a hole. If you can’t say what your visitor wants (step 2) or what they pay (step 6), you don’t understand them yet.

And an honest word about the sixth step: advertising has a particular weakness for skipping it. “Simple and effortless” convinces nobody, because everything you find costs something. If you write that a client has to spend time or make a decision, people believe you more.

What the hero’s journey is criticized for

The pattern is so widespread that it is worth knowing what researchers think of it. We retell objections listed in the encyclopedia articles linked at the end.

Picking the examples. Folklorists, the scholars who study oral traditions, noted that Campbell took the stories that fit his pattern and passed over those that didn’t. Among the critics are the folklorists Alan Dundes and Barre Toelken. For us the conclusion is this: the pattern describes many stories, but not “all” of them and not “necessarily”.

One culture posing as all. The myths of different peoples are merged into one pattern, and what mattered to each people is lost: context, meaning, ritual.

Male experience. Leaving, a duel, a victory, coming home with a trophy describe only one kind of path. In 1990 the American psychotherapist Maureen Murdock proposed other steps in her book The Heroine’s Journey, where inner change and the restoring of wholeness count as much as outer victories. Other versions followed, such as Valerie Frankel’s. Note that these are additions and objections, not a final answer.

The carrier bag. The writer Ursula K. Le Guin, in her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986, collected in Dancing at the Edge of the World), reminds us that the first tool of humankind was probably not a spear but a container for what was gathered: a basket, a bag. A story, too, can be a bag in which people, things and events are carried and shown in relation to each other, not only the hero’s arrow flying to a victory over an enemy. Le Guin objects to the habit of counting only the tale of a duel as the “real” story.

Sameness. In practice, the problem that matters most for a site is a different one: if every company tells how its founder met a problem, found a solution and now “helps thousands”, the reader recognizes the template before they finish the first line. A template is good for checking, but bad as a form.

Check yourself: what does Le Guin offer in place of the story-as-arrow?

The story as a bag: a tale that gathers people, things and events into a whole, with no main duel.

Shapes with no peak, and Vonnegut

The novelist Kurt Vonnegut once proposed, half joking, that stories have shapes you can draw. Put time on one axis and the hero’s fortune, from ill to good, on the other, and a story becomes a line. Some lines are simple. In “Man in a Hole” someone gets into trouble, gets out, and ends up better off than they started. In “Boy Meets Girl” a person finds something wonderful, loses it, and gets it back. He also pointed out that life itself is hard to read this way, because we often can’t tell good news from bad, and that a story with a clear line is a comfort. His lecture is in the videos below.

For a site this has one practical use. A case study is almost always a Man in a Hole: a client in trouble, a way out, and a better place than before. Draw that line before you write it, and check that the dip is real. A case study without a dip is a flat line, and nobody reads it.

Check yourself: what is a “Man in a Hole” story?

Someone falls into trouble, gets out, and finishes better off than they began. Most case studies have this shape.

What to do with all this

Three simple rules.

1. Use a pattern as a set of questions. “What does my client want? What stands in the way? What do they pay? What changed?” These questions help you understand the client.
2. Check with facts. Every step should rest on something real: a case, a number, a document. A pattern doesn’t replace material.
3. Choose the shape by the material. You have one vivid case with a turn: take the pyramid or the hero’s journey. You have a calm service with no drama and many different people: think of the “bag” form, or of the Japanese form with no conflict that the next lesson covers.

Check yourself: how do you use a pattern without ending up with a story like everyone else’s?

As a set of questions for your own material, not as a mold to pour facts into. And check each step against a real case or a number.

Practice

Walk the circle for the hero from your brief.

• Write steps 1 and 2 without “we”, “our” or “us”.
• Your service enters in steps 3 to 6. Name it the way the brief does.
• Step 8 is the change in the hero’s life, not a call to action.
• At the end, say in one sentence where the pattern doesn’t fit your project. This isn’t a box-checking exercise: answers like these are what later point to the right shape.

What patterns leave out

All the patterns in this lesson were invented by people who wanted to explain how stories work, often after the stories were written. If your story works well without a pattern, check it against one, but don’t break it.