The Simple Brilliance of Dan Harmon's Story Circle

The Story Circle is shockingly versatile — perfect for screenwriting, personal narratives, brand narratives, case studies, and more.

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Late last year, I did something crazy: I gave up a dream job as the Head of Marketing at a fast-growing, well-funded AI startup to bet on myself as a writer.

So far, it’s going shockingly well. I have fractional marketing gigs that pay the bills, supplemented by running AI and storytelling workshops for revenue teams. I’m writing my second non-fiction book and working on a couple TV projects. My anxiety levels are so low, I’m not sure I’m technically Jewish anymore.

Over the past few months, I’ve fallen in love with a framework that works for almost every type of story I’m telling, from a brand narratives to a TV pilot — Dan Harmon’s Story Circle.

Harmon is a legend. The 3x-Emmy-winner created Community and Rick and Morty, two of the most iconic comedy shows of the last 15 years. He’s Hollywood but looks like he should be teaching creative writing at Vassar and micro-dosing with his students after class. In the late 1990s, he wanted to help filmmakers learn to tell a story in just five minutes for his short-film festival, Channel 101. So, channeling some professor energy, he codified his storytelling process. The Story Circle was born.

Via Boords

In a brilliant behind-the-scenes video for Adult Swim, Harmon breaks down the 8 simple steps of the Story Circle — or as he calls it, “The Embryo”:

1. You have a relatable character who exists in comfort

2. They have some kind of need or wish

3. That causes them to go across a threshold

4. Where they start to search for something

5. They find it

6. They take it — but it kind of kicks their ass

7. Then they return to the world they started in

8. Having changed.

Or as Harmon wrote in even simpler terms in the original tutorial on the Channel 101 blog:

1. You

2. Need

3. Go

4. Search

5. Find

6. Take

7. Return

8. Change

Say it out loud. Chant it. (The chanting feels pretty good.) It’s a simple mantra you can memorize in an hour and conjure every time you sit down to write.

The Story Circle in Action: 3 Key Use Cases

My fellow lit nerds will notice that Harmon’s Story Circle resembles Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, following the monomyth pattern. But while the Hero’s Journey contains 17 steps and works best for longer works of fantasy and sci-fi, the Story Circle is easier to use and more versatile. It’s perfect for short-form and long-form, fiction and nonfiction, video or text. Let’s explore three key use cases.

Screenwriting and Fiction

Let’s revisit the video above where Harmon breaks down how he used the Story Circle to write one of the most famous episodes of Rick and Morty: Mortynight Run.

Here’s how Harmon breaks down the plot:

1. Morty exists in comfort — until he realizes Rick is an arms dealer to assassins.

2. Morty doesn’t believe in murder. So he needs to stop Rick.

3. So he goes on an adventure, stealing Rick’s car keys

4. Searching for a way to undue Rick’s damage.

5. He finds the assassins and their target, an alien gas being named “Fart.” (I swear this show is way smarter than it sounds.)

6. Morty accidentally takes the assassins’ lives and saves Fart, but pays a price since Fart is evil and wants to kill everyone.

7. He returns to a normal part of the universe

8. But realizes that he needs to murder Fart, changing into someone who no longer believes in absolute morality and is willing to kill.

It’s a brilliantly simple formula you can apply to most any story. My favorite part of this video is how Harmon applies it to both the A plot (Morty) and the B plot (his dad, Jerry).

There’s also beautiful symmetry in the Story Circle. Go is opposite Return; Search is opposite Change; Need is opposite Take. This gives your story satisfying balance and flow.

Personal essays and founder narratives

Whether you’re auditioning for the Moth, or explaining your winding career path in a job interview, or ghostwriting a college-application essay for a dumb rich kid, personal narratives are all about transformation.

Let’s take another use case I’ve been working on for a client — the Founder Story. For most startups, the Founder Story is the most powerful story you can tell, but they usually fall flat because they’re devoid of any conflict or tension. “I started this company, raised a bunch of money, and everything’s gone perfectly!” No one believes you, Brad. Your bravado poorly shields your tears.

The best founder narratives embrace conflict and mistakes. They reveal how trials, tribulations, and missteps changed them for the better. From Steve Jobs to Sarah Blakely, the Founder Stories that stick follow the Story Circle arc:

1. The Founder lives a relatively comfortable life

2. But there’s a problem they need to solve.

3. So they cross the threshold and go on an adventure to build the solution.

4. They search for the right approach.

5. They find it.

6. And take the opportunity — but then things get hard. They make mistakes.

7. So they return to the first principles that inspired them to start the company in the first place

8. And emerge changed, having taken the product to new heights while becoming a stronger founder and leader.

Watch Steve Jobs’ 2005 Commencement Address at Stanford — his story follows this arc beat-by-beat, all the way down to his literal return to Apple in the 1990s.

Customer stories

Similarly, most case studies and customer stories fail to build trust or change prospects’ minds because they’re too perfect. “We implemented X solution and — BAM — 10x ROI.” Most buyers will think, “I can’t relate to that. My company is an absolute shit show. There’s no way their use case is anything like mine.”

Again, embrace the messiness and tension. Tell the story of the person who bought from you and became a hero, not just the tale of a corporate entity. This approach builds more trust — particularly in 1-1 sales conversations.

1. The champion at one of your clients existed in a relatively comfortable status quo

2. But they needed to drive better results.

3. So they crossed the threshold and went out

4. Searching for a solution

5. they found you.

6. They took the leap and signed up — but there were tricky parts of their use case (that are also the tricky parts of your prospect’s use case).

7. But you delivered a solution, and your champion returned a hero

8. Having changed — they transformed the way their company does business for the better and got a promotion.

This story arc builds far more trust than a glossy case study. Getting shit done inside most companies is messy. It shows your prospect that you’re able to overcome the kind of challenges they’re likely to face when rolling out your solution — whether it’s bad data, a fucked up website back-end, or employees resistant to change.

Try the Story Circle framework the next time you’re crafting a story. Then reply to this newsletter or drop a comment — I’d love to hear how it goes.

If you enjoyed this story, you might like:

• The Simple Shapes of Great Stories, According to Kurt Vonnegut

• The Golden Rule of Storytelling, According to South Park’s Creators

• The Science of Persuasive Storytelling

Content/marketing advice of the week

At a CMO meetup a few weeks ago, Seth Godin articulated the biggest difference between B2B and B2C customers:

With B2C customers, they’re spending their own money.

With B2B customers, they’re not spending their own money — they’re spending social capital. If you want to convince someone to buy a B2B product, you need to give them a story they can tell their boss about why your solution will be better than the status quo.

If you don’t give your champion a good enough story to tell internally, they’ll never fight for you. That story is everything.

Crazy story of the week

The US Office of the Copyright released the pre-publication of a 108-page study that shockingly sides with writers, artists, and publishers over AI companies. It could have a huge impact on open lawsuits (like NYT/famous authors vs. OpenAI). But as a twist, the Trump administration fired the head of the Copyright Office right after it came out. I break it down from my Brooklyn balcony: