I don’t believe the claims that these concepts are eternal innate principles of storytelling. That’s bunk. However I believe it is true that if you need a starting point, a way in to structuring a story, any of these ideas can work. It’s just a matter of what appeals to you. Plenty of writers have followed guidelines like this to great effect. Others think it’s tosh and some of the greatest stories break the patterns he describes.
And yet Dan Harmon still manages to write popular and effective stories based solely on pseudoscientific principles. Storywriting is an art, not a science, after all; vague brush strokes are what you need to get the job done, and if it's possible to get good stories out of Jung's theories then maybe you should rethink how useless pseudoscience really is.
That's besides the point. He's here claiming to explain the mechanics of how it works, not telling us a story. Most athletes can do amazing things without understanding the first thing about the mechanics. In fact, we can do amazing things without understanding any biology, chemistry or physics.
Oh sure, I mentioned this before in another comment here. All the pseudo-psychology stuff may be bunk, but it can still be useful as a framework to hang your story on, even if only in the training wheels stage.
That's because they weren't trying to explain anything as if it were true, just telling a story. These posts are stating a bunch of psuedofacts as if they're true, more a form of misinformation than storytelling.
One of the best insights I ever received as to the popularity of Freudian and Jungian psychology in spite of discrediting is how well Psychoanalysis analogues commercial storytelling.
In both you take grand events, gestures, or themes. Weave together a “why” as to why something happened. Then take away some grand life lesson from those events.
With Psychoanalysis, it goes something like;
1. I feel exhausted all the time
2. Because I have nightmares
3. Nightmares about being a failure at work and school
4. I am constantly afraid of failure
5. Because my parents always nagged and harped on me about avoiding being a failure
6. I am told to "kill" the version
With a fictional narrative, they'll take this process and make it metaphorical. Maybe make the nightmares an antagonistic force, symbolic of failure and criticism. Have the patient literally fight the feelings of failure, make them embrace failure, and then kill the metaphorical symbol of their parents as a form of processing.
Meanwhile, the modern psychological approach to dealing with the initial problem is much less narratively satisfying.
1. I feel exhausted all the time
2. Talk to a psychiatrist, who may prescribe a combination of anti-psychotics (to reduce the amount of sleepless nights) and clinical talk therapy to help address coping mechanisms to enable reducing anti-psychotics.
3. Start taking pills and feeling more rested during the day, which allows one to feel less exhausted at work and daily life activities; which makes them less anxious of failure since they have the ability to properly address issues.
4. Go to a psychologist who may introduce CBT techniques and provide a failure-free environment to allow the patient to more adequately express and understand their issues.
5. During moments of high stress, the patient uses coping mechanisms which reduce the tendency for nightmares to occur. And allows them to wean off anti-psychotics, and allows them restful sleep once more.
The differences between the classical psychoanalytical framework of psychiatry, and modern evidence-based techniques illustrate why story tellers (like Dan Harmon) love and use concepts and ideas from psychoanalysis. It is already based around creating a narrative around life events to provide a life lesson for a patient.
For those complaining that this structure doesn't fit their favorite stories - of course not all story types can fit into this one (or any one) scheme. The one presented is a trope sometimes called "The Hero's Journey", and while not all stories fall into that category, a lot of them follow the basic tenet outlined in the article.
Also, the term "101" should make it obvious that this it not meant to serve as an all encompassing compendium. It's an introductory piece that outlines a basic structure, to get started thinking about commonalities in story telling.
It's also nothing new. If you scroll down to the comments, you'll find a mention of the book "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell which is a go-to treaty on the subject - and it's from 1949! (I personally find it a bit of a slow read, but it does cover an impressive amount of classic narratives.)
The problem is that the author is claiming (at least in the next parts of this series) that essentially any story follows this formula - from scripts to books to anecdotes we tell each other to our more vivid dreams.
Of course, that is completely wrong, and while the hero's journey is indeed a very basic and common story structure, it is most certainly not universal (unless you stretch it beyond all reasonableness).
> unless you stretch it beyond all reasonableness).
Im gonna give you a spoiler, he does.
Dan Harmon's sotry circle is how he wrote most of the episodes of Community and Rick and Morty, and tbh he uses it to great effect even when he tells anecdotes and stories (he famously played a DnD campaign where he would meta roleplay to add necessary steps to the circle to make the stories more compelling even if they were not the best strategy at the moment).
Due to his adherance to his own method, he sees it everywhere, to the point where most of us would be squinting to see what he even means.
Its just a framework and he really likes it. Essentially the same as a dude who really likes one programming language and uses it out of place, in a terribly complicated place because he just really likes it.
Community is very funny, but god, every single episode has the same layout, the same emotional conflict, the same heartfelt speech 3/4 of the way in...
The Hero's Journey in this form was adapted to a Hollywood script writing formula from Campbell's books, iirc. The dumbing down into a single formula mostly happened after the success of Star Wars, for which Lucas referenced Campbell's monomyth.
If you like "The Hero's Journey", you might like Noah Caldwell Gervais discussion of it with regards to Star Wars (KOTOR in particular in this case): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI2iOB8ydGo
As he points out, there's a lot of troubling stuff in The Hero's Journey, but there's still a lot that is of interest, particularly with how it informed the Star Wars universe.
One other note is that the story circle doesn't necessarily map to a text. A movie may have three circles (two consecutive ones for the A plot, one for the B plot). A book may have six. A fantasy epic might have twenty iterations of the circle in each volume.
Craig Mazin, the screenwriter of HBO's Chernobyl and the Last of Us series, once gave an awesome 45 minute lecture on his ScriptNotes podcast titled “How to write a movie,” in which he walks through how he thinks of storytelling and story structure. If you have any interest in storytelling or screenwriting, it’s a fabulous listen. (You could argue that anything that smacks of formulaic storytelling should be avoided at all costs, but I think it’s still critically important to understand the basic tenets of strong storytelling structure. And as someone who enjoys both of Craig's HBO series, I would say he’s proven he knows how to tell a good story.)
> You could argue that anything that smacks of formulaic storytelling should be avoided at all costs
One could effectively argue all good story telling is formulaic. There are certain aspects of a story that have to be in place otherwise it's just words being spewed.
I disagree with calling it formulaic. Formulaic is when the exact trajectory or beats is wholly predictable to the point where personal investment or intrigue isn't possible.
I would instead describe structure as the act of launching an arrow, and giving the reader a promise that the arrow has a target to strike.
I got to watch him talk at the LA festival of books along with Adam Higginbotham just before the series came out. Will definitely be digging into the podcast.
Same as with music theory, writing, programming, or other creative endeavors or art. The thing is that when someone creates something from their heart, from an incredible desire to create and share their vision or experience, it often ends up following some kind of storytelling guideline. And that is because stories worth listening to have a structure that makes them engaging.
The problem comes in when someone tries to analyse the structure of stories and assume that they can create a template for telling new stories. If you start with the template (or the music theory, or the best practices) you end up with something that feels formulaic and like crap.
Theories of art are always descriptive and inductive, not proscriptive or deductive.
A common aphorism for this is often "you need to know the rules to know when to break the rules". It does seem common in creative arts that the novices are not beholden to rules because they do not know them, the intermediate practitioners stick strictly to the rules because they know them, and the proficient practitioners are not beholden to the rules because they know them too well and understand the consequences of what happens when they break them.
It can be the consequences that are the interesting part. "Rules" provide structure and maps, and people like that up to a point. Sometimes it can be fun to stick to the map. Sometimes it's fun to take people off the map and make them a little uncomfortable, when you know how to reward them for taking that journey off the map with you.
Here are some of my favorite movies: The Graduate, Taxi Driver, The Fearless Vampire Killers, Badlands, Mars Attacks, The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Most of them don't really satisfy this formula, except for trivial points like the protagonists wants something and the protagonist has changed or if you're deliberately trying to fit them by being extremely vague.
The reason is that there are many different types of stories and these can have very different internal structure. For example, Space Opera in science fiction is often just a fight of good vs. evil set at many different interesting locations. Of course, some protagonist should develop, hence change, and it's good to have some kind of unexpected plot twist, but these are trivialities.
The trivial points as you’ve called them are not really trivial, but they could be considered cliche, or if you like, ubiquitous, which is Harmon’s entire point.
Why teach something cliché and ubiquitous as a general storytelling advice?
I've written 10+ novels and am relatively certain that none of them would be better if I had based them on this "story circle" (Harmon's rendition of "hero's journey").
It's as good advice as the ABABCB song structure is for writing pop songs. As cliche as they are, you need to understand the rules to know how to break them.
Storytelling is for the HUMANS who hear the story, because our lives are in the format of heroes journeys. It matters not if most or some movies/stories follow it, because if the story doesn’t follow it - it’s not remembered by HUMANS. Because, you guessed it…our lives are in the format of a monomyth.
Joseph Campbell was an anthropologist. Not a script writer.
Christopher Vogler was a script writer for Disney.
They both understood that stories were just a vehicle for lessons. And if the structure wasn’t followed then the lesson wouldn’t be received, let alone passed down from generation to generation.
The super super basic shit is 3 steps:
1. Normal world- suspect something is wrong
2. Supernatural world- seek the thing that makes it right
3. Return- bring it back to share
That format fits not only every story ever told, but more importantly - it’s the dna of your life experience. And if you disagree, then ask yourself: am I refusing the call to adventure or a stage in the journey in my life? Give it a shot. It’ll change your life.
Side note: by “lesson” I mean the fundamental building blocks of your worldview. Lookup Weltanschauung.
That formula does not fit every story ever told, or even every popular story. Consider a romance story, where the protagonist doesn't "bring it back to share" at the end, because their journey is entirely personal. Or wilderness survival stories, where there isn't necessarily anything wrong with the normal world at all; the problem is that they are in the supernatural world to begin with, and it challenges them in ways they must endure. Slasher movies and other horror movies follow more of a "(1) something is wrong in the normal world, (2) people get sliced up, (3) everyone's dead" plan that may not involve any grand symbolic journey more substantial than the journey from a sharp knife to a bare throat.
As people try to generalize the hero's journey to claim it fits all stories, they simplify it by paring away many of Campbell's more specific elements, like "the meeting with the goddess" or "atonement with the father," but even the most pared-down version still does not describe all stories. How about The Stranger by Camus? That story doesn't map onto the hero's journey at all. Waiting for Godot? That story doesn't even resolve its narrative tension in any conventional way.
The urge to generalize narrative is understandable, but I think it's a mistake. Ultimately, the purpose of art is simply to provoke interesting or entertaining emotions in its viewers, and a story doesn't need any one essential component to do this. There are recurring conventions and useful tools that repeatedly crop up in genres and in the medium as a whole, but these are not necessary—only commonplace.
> They both understood that stories were just a vehicle for lessons.
I agree, but it's much too bold to suggest that the hero's journey fits every story ever told. It's entirely possible to demonstrate a lesson without having a journey at all. You don't need a protagonist to end up in a better place, and you don't even need the protagonist to experience any growth; sometimes the cruel indifference of fate is the lesson, and sometimes a character's lack of growth demonstrates by way of example the importance of growth.
More importantly what Dan Harmon is describing is what I would call a 4-act “Descent into Hell,” with acts “Setup, Descent, Belly of the Beast, Escape.” This is a very general structure, but the phrasing of that last act as “Escape” makes it fundamentally a comedy (Substitute your favorite rom-com! Or, for a really interesting case, the Amy Poehler/Tina Fey comedy Sisters is a descent-into-hell where the hell in question is the stereotypical-High-School-drinking-party trope).
It also isn't even universal for comedies: if we diagram the descent-into-hell as
____ _
\ /
\ /
\____/
Then there is clearly an inversion of this story structure which is an ascent into heaven, looking instead like
____
/ \
/ \
____/ \_
This is actually so common of a Far-Eastern storytelling device that it is best known by a Japanese name, Kishotenketsu[1].
The basic idea is that you still need a setup act to tell the people who the characters are, and those characters still are not perfect and still have flaws which may be addressed by the end of the work, but you do not need to motivate their ascent to heaven: everybody wants to go to heaven, it's obvious why they wanted to go too. Similarly unlike the Descent phase where everything is difficult to make the story believable, in the Ascent phase everything is candy bars and ice cream, the character is unreasonably successful, beyond what we would have imagined. Where the Belly of the Beast in Hell amounts to mounting successes in the face of overwhelming odds, the Belly of the Beast in heaven amounts to mounting friction in this place that is supposed to be paradise. And that needs to build up to a sudden explanation of the friction, a twist, where paradise is not what it seemed and the character must flee, having acquired nevertheless what they need to resolve their difficulties at home.
Another interesting subversion is when the last act of descent into hell is not Escape, is not Tragic Collapse, but is Redemption: Hell is turned into the mundane world. That's just a different sort of comedy that can work very well, I am thinking for example of Will Ferrell’s classic Elf where Hell is clearly NYC and its utter lack of Christmas Spirit, and Buddy the Elf brings that spirit back to NYC. This I would call a “Light-bringer” structure because it doesn't have the same motifs of descent or ascent...
We only wish our lives were in the form of heroes' journeys. That wish is why the formula has its power, not the actual fact of our lives, which on objective inspection more closely resemble random assemblages of events.
It has nothing to do with the kinds of stories I tell when I go for a walk, come back, and tell the household something about what I saw. "Today there were many crows, hundreds of them flying through the air." I can embellish that moment and add details like, "and one of them swooped down near me and I had to duck." And that's life information, that's like, "oh, being around birds can be dangerous." And yet it has no hero's journey in it, unless going for a walk is a "call to adventure". What it has is story elements: moments with meaningful relationship, encoded in a way that audiences can immediately digest. I once took a fiction writing class where one of the students could not filter her stories down beyond a bare enumeration of events that took place on a certain day: everything was included, the bathroom trips, the specific purchases, the things family members said to each other, the "oh, I forgot something, we need to go back". As a story, it was incredibly hard to follow because it was data, not information.
What does tend to happen as story elements get added and more tightly bound together is something resembling traditional story structures. But that's like observing that natural systems tend to look like scale-free networks: it's an "end-up", not a "fate". Most of the industrial products made to fit story templates are providing entertainment, but only a facade of information: the story is actually built on wish-fulfillment or appeal to preexisting beliefs(nothing sells like a story you want to hear because it validates you), and the formula suggests a way to fill up runtime reiterating that.
Your comment makes a lot of sense to me. But I think that "Today there were many crows, hundreds of them flying through the air" is your definition of data, not a story. Mentioning having to duck is either a detail (more data) or an event in an incomplete story e.g. if you go on to explain how you made a truce with the crows. There's information in the crow statement only if it communicates more than a proclamation that you went on a walk. People often hate when people tell them their dreams because it's (nonsensical) data mistaken for a story. There's no information.
Maybe I am watching the wrong movies, reading the wrong books and playing the wrong games, but I followed the prompt to think about those and they don't match. It's not that the protagonist wants something, but something happens to them.
The pattern I found mostly is
- in comfort
- something bad happens
- try to get out of bad situation/get revenge
- overcome many difficulties
- maybe some plot twist
- overcome last difficulty
What are good examples of the story setup in the articles?
> It's not that the protagonist wants something, but something happens to them.
It usually is both. If the protagonist doesn’t want anything then they (and the story) feels directionless. If there is no bad thing happening to them then the audience is left wondering why the protagonist deciced to go on a crazy adventure now, instead of some other time.
Let me illustrate this with the start of Star Wars a New Hope.
Luke clearly wants to leave his podunk life and seek adventure. Also and independently of this the Empire swoops in and kills the people who has raised him.
If the bad thing doesn’t happen he would finish his chores and then pick up some power converters.
If he wouldn’t have the want of an adventure he would hand over the droids, and grieve his uncle and aunt. He also probably would go and pick up some power converters.
For the story to happen you needed both, the want and the bad thing. Otherwise the farmer boy would have remained a farmer boy.
> What are good examples of the story setup in the articles?
How about you pick a story and if we also know it we can try to see if the pattern fits? It really is kinda universal. Not saying that all stories will fit but it is harder to find exceptions than examples.
Yes, Star Wars seems to be a good fit. The first Harry Potter is also a good example of both "preconditions" being there.
Originally, when I was trying to think about stories, the following came to mind
- Revenge movies like John Wick (the first one), and video games like The Last of Us 2, where the protagonist originally just wants to go about his affairs, but bad things happen to them and they want revenge.
- "Catastrophe" movies like Alien, Predator, Terminator 2, where the protagonist needs to act to stay alive.
For revenge/catastrophe movies, the transition from 1 to 2 is changing what the character "wants". That original desire isn't the actual desire that drives the actions of the story. For example, John Wick wants to grieve the death of his wife, but a series of events changes his desire from grief to revenge. It's that want for revenge that the rest of the story relies upon. An argument can also be made that his desire to grieve in peace is still the ultimate desire, but he can't do so emotionally until he gets his revenge.
The circle described by Harmon are just the overarching story beats, but there's plenty liberty to be had when moving from one beat to the next. There's also liberty in whether steps overlap or are combined, such as where the desire is defined/reshaped at the same time that they enter an unfamiliar situation (e.g., desire changes to one of survival at the same time as a catastrophe beginning).
In other words, the points on the circle may still exist regardless of what happens between them or if they happen simultaneously. Even acknowledging the liberty to be had, there's always exceptions to this heuristic and not every story will follow this structure.
Wick has the call to adventure and the refusal, IIRC. In the encounter at the gas station the punks (who will go on to—this is surely not a spoiler at this point?—kill his dog, which is where they fuck up) are insulting Wick but, despite of course knowing he could take them apart in his sleep, he puts up with it. He's above that, and can't be goaded into breaking a promise to stay out of that life, by mere words. Their actions afterward are what rip him out of his life and drag him back into the game—violence finds him, not the other way around. But he does refuse that initial "call", and it's an important part of the story that he does.
(this is from memory, maybe that encounter goes differently than I recall)
> It's not that the protagonist wants something, but something happens to them.
Both have to happen, most of the time.
I think most story starts with the protagonist in some sort of _status quo_, where change is resisted, either because the protagonist doesn't want to change, or because the protagonist is incapable of change. Then, a catalyst happens (doesn't have to be something bad, though, for instance, in Harry Potter, the letter from Hogwarts is a good thing that kicks Harry out of the status quo), and the protagonist now wants or needs something so much that they has to enter and deal with unfamiliar situations.
Without "something happens to them", it's just strange that the protagonist suddenly decides to do something different without any reason. But ultimately, it has to be their choice to react to the catalyst. Making a decision is one of the most empathizeable elements of a story. It lets the reader step into the character's shoes and feel their inner debate.
That's because the author slapped some different and ill-fitting labels onto the classic Hero's Journey[0] cycle. I can't tell why they would do this, maybe they wanted it to appeal to modern audiences or perhaps they wanted to put their own unique daub of paint on it, but it seems they have simply confused the reader or turned them off completely.
The way I read it is that “want something” can be just wanting to live your ordinary life. Which will then become at odds with something extraordinary.
Originally, when I was trying to think about stories, the following came to mind
- Revenge movies like John Wick (the first one), and video games like The Last of Us 2, where the protagonist originally just wants to go about his affairs, but bad things happen to them and they want revenge.
- "Catastrophe" movies like Alien, Predator, Terminator 2, where the protagonist needs to act to stay alive
From another commenter I understand that the revenge or will to survive becomes the want. But not sure if it really fits the presented scheme that well anymore.
The very basics of storytelling. By definition, you need to be following the "very vague" definition here. Don't read too much into it and don't overthink it, because it's the opposite of what the author (a stellar creator of stories, himself) intended. Most stories, when looked at from a very high level, generally follow this formula. You are suffering from "can't see the forest for the trees" syndrome, old chap.
For one thing, this only really applies to stories with a single protagonist. But lots of stories don't have a protagonist, and thus rarely fit this mold at all.
While Game of Thrones / ASOIAF have many separate interconnected stories and might indeed simply have multiple circles, one for each point of view character*, there are many stories that have a cast of characters and no protagonist.
For example, you could, in principle, analyze the story of each individual character in the Iliad, but that would be missing the story. The story of the Iliad encompasses all of these different characters doing to their part to advance or retard their cause. Different characters are more important in different parts, but there is a single cohesive story being told.
* though even here I would say that the stories of many of the characters don't match the circle model - notably, Ned doesn't return to anything.
The article is about how to write boring predictable story when you are not a writer. Of course good art - books, games or movies are not like that. And of course comfort food kind of stories are different too, because those have different formulas.
Literally anything "at least resemble" literally everything if you are super determine to twist the patterns. Anyway, other people described it well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34577173 Or, "the gods are thirsty" or the movie "memento". Any story that ends badly, so essentially every single tragedy and the majority of Russian literature (hello Dostoyevsky). Mystery genre and horrors, including notable Edgar Allen Poe. Majority of romantic literature. Surrealism and avantgarde also avoid these patterns.
What is described here is super simple hero journey. Not everything is an adventure.
Inverting some of the key stages to subvert the audience’s expectations, overlapping arcs, and/or stopping or starting in the wrong place, seems to me to provide enough variability to cover those examples.
But if it doesn’t have the tell-tale elements we have a hard time recognizing it as a story, and then we don’t have expectations to subvert.
Really? Even the good books or the great are all: Start from a relative calm position and get to know the Characters. Something happens or something lacks. Go down in the underworld or into danger and returns with something (sometimes knowledge), but is changed. Uses this something to save the world (whatever the world may be, could also be the universe or his family) and arrives again at relative calm.
This assumes that all the great books end well and that they are all adventure books. Also, fairly frequent ending is cliffhanger, where author intentionally ends in conflict and suspense to make you buy next one.
Even the Homer Odyssey is more complex then this pattern (except for its most boring chapters).
I guess you can end a book somewhere before or after the circle completes to have a cliffhanger ending. So maybe the story hasn't ended yet, but the book has.
And you are right; not all books are like that: I just finished “Catcher in the Rey”. The protagonist goes through his ordeal totally unchanged; it is infuriating. I wanted to scream: Dude, didn't you get any wiser! On the other hand: He goes from a safe place, in the underworld of NY, through the night, faces dangers, returns home; depressed and tired; having learned… nothing!
While I completely agree that many excellent books/stories follow this format (even some of the best in history, such as the Odyssey, or the Epic of Gilgamesh), this is certainly not a universal structure. Many excellent moving stories follow different conventions, or end the story on different notes.
For example, sticking with ancient myths, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice ends with the hero's defeat, he fails his greatest challenge and returns empty-handed, nothing having been resolved, not even any wiser. You could say the story contains the first few elements, but it wildly diverges towards the end.
I think a lot of the confusion comes from people not separating story and plot. A plot can be the most boring thing ever, the entertainment is in the telling.
A great piece of advice I got for public speaking is that you can structure a talk around the hero's journey... but you aren't the hero. You are the Yoda-like advisor character who's helping guide the hero (your audience) along the path, from their current default state to a new, improved mental model of the world at the end.
Nancy Duarte's book Resonate covers this idea in detail.
There is tons of fascinating things on storytelling. One page i like to browse is tvtropes. It's collecting aspects of stories and categorizes them. For example unobtanium: ""Unobtainium is engineering jargon for, "a material that would be perfect for our purposes, if we could get it, which we can't." ""
Or the story types, where there are 3, 6, 7, 36 depending on how you categorize them. Reading about them and seeing how they are used in all our Media is fascinating.
because no-one appears to have said it explicitly yes, this is the "Hero's Journey" but MORE IMPORTANTLY this is just one of MANY story structures.
It's just the one that Western European & American (continent not country) authors seem to prefer. I know it's not the default in East Asia (see Kishōtenketsu). I assume it's not the default in many other places. And if we set aside the major default ones there are still many other structures to choose from.
It's more in the ancient European culture (Greek and Roman classic structure) and in the American culture, but in Europe the best cinema of '60s and later considered this a cliche and hardly followed such structure. For instance in many great movies of French or Italian directors things start normal and monotonically get worse.
Kind of pretentious to call it "Story Structure 101" unless we're qualifying this as the author's types of stories. In which case, fine.
What about stories where the hero gets what they wanted, it's a net good for everyone, and the only heavy price is a newfound responsibility to maintain this good rather than "returning to a familiar situation"? To me, that's an actual hero.
What about them? The scenario you provided sounds like a perfectly valid fit for the circle he’s describing. In the end, your hero now has a newfound responsibility to maintain the good. That’s huge. How did she come to that realization? The “Return” phase is precisely where she would process that discovery.
“For some characters, [7. Return] is as easy as hugging the scarecrow goodbye and waking up. […] or in a love story, having realized what’s important.”
Based off your description, I’m imagining a heartwarming and simple story about a scientist who wants to find a cure for cancer:
1. ESTABLISH A PROTAGONIST: We meet her in college.
2. SOMETHING AIN'T QUITE RIGHT: We learn that her brother has cancer, and that she wants to cure it.
3. CROSSING THE THRESHOLD: She gets hired at a prestigious cancer research lab.
4. THE ROAD OF TRIALS: Night after night, she stays up late pouring over data.
5. MEETING WITH THE GODDESS: She finally discovers a cure for cancer.
6. MEET YOUR MAKER; The late nights have taken their toll and she’s exhausted, but she’s overwhelmed with happiness that her hard work has paid off.
7. BRINGING IT HOME: She begins to feel the weight of how important her work will be for both her brother and humanity at large.
8. MASTER OF BOTH WORLDS: She accomplishes what she set out to do; cure her brother’s cancer. She also sends the entirety of her research to universities, science journals, and news outlets the world over, ensuring that no single company can own the manufacturing process of this cure.
You can do anything with story as long as you write it well.
If you know you're not going to be writing it especially well, use the tropes.
One of the problems with US television in the broadcast and early cable age was that all television series were 22-26 episodes long. Another was that after the first air date, viewers would be likely to encounter them out of order.
As a direct result, television series avoided having one episode refer to another. The major exception were soap operas, which often ran 4-6 episodes every week and specifically maintained continuity -- there are/were digest magazines devoted to catching watchers up on current storylines.
Aragorn was totally changed though; he had to watch Frodo leave on the elven ships to the land of the Maiar (iirc) because he couldn't deal with the pain of having been the ring bearer; the love of his life was immortal and she gave up her place in the Undying Lands for him, he watched the collapse of the Dwarves, and the light of magic leave the land - and because of his Numenorian blood he was to stand at this precipice, knowing everything the world had lost, and he'd have nobody to share it with - it would quickly become legend/myth.
Aragorn was mighty - but he was absolutely changed. Beautiful but tragic.
The point is that Aragorn has not had to sacrifice any major thing. Of course he is changed in many ways, and he does feel the weight of the events, and his invreased responsibility.
But this is really not comparable to Luke losing his hand, or Frodo taking on the taint of evil (and losing a finger), or Iron Man losing his hear, or Gilgamesh losing Enkidu. Stretching the hero's journey so far would only show it to be a shallow trick.
> The point is that Aragorn has not had to sacrifice any major thing.
Aragorn's sacrifices occurred before the story began. He was the rightful king, yet had wandered in the wilderness for something like 90 years, defending people who not only did not appreciate him, but were actively suspicious of him.
He also had little or no hope of regaining the kingdom -- and also little or no hope of marrying the woman he loved (as Elrond had forbidden her to marry him unless he somehow became king).
That's gotta wear on a guy after the first, say, 50 or 60 years.
That would still not make Aragorn's story fit the model, since all of the trials and tribulations that we see him go through would then have happened after the sacrifice, not before it as in the model.
Aragorn had many trials and tribulations afterward, particularly leading the army to the Black Gate. They basically assumed they were on a suicide mission, but did it anyway in an attempt to distract Sauron from Frodo and Sam.
Aragorn is also not really the hero of the story, he's just a side character who adds flavour to the story which is really about the hobbits. I don't think side characters need any specific story arc to make them interesting, they just need to be unique in some way.
There are numerous chapters dedicated entirely to Aragorn's story (as there are for Sam and Frodo, for Merry and Pippin). I very very much disagree that he is just a side character. The Lord of the Rings is of an "ensemble cast", with no single protagonist. So while Aragorn is not The Hero, neither is Frodo, nor Sam.
I would absolutely argue that Frodo is the protagonist/hero of The Lord of the Rings. ("Protagonist" and "hero" aren't always interchangeable, but they are in this case.) Yes, other characters in LotR have their own stories and even their own arcs -- but that's true for many, even most, novels over a certain length. Many characters in LotR have their own stories with beginnings and endings, but the epic's overarching plot is that of the journey to destroy the One Ring and end Sauron's threat once and for all -- and that journey is the journey of the Ringbearer.
One of the most trenchant pieces of advice I got from a workshop instructor -- an award-winning fantasy novelist -- when I was struggling with a novel outline was "come up with an arc for all of your major characters, not just Gail [the protagonist]." Every major character in a story has something they want, has a place they start and a place they end up. Obviously stories can have multiple protagonists, but not every character who has a discernible arc is a protagonist, and not every story with an "ensemble cast" is one with multiple protagonists. (e.g., Ocean's Eleven is about an ensemble, but structurally, Danny Ocean is absolutely the protagonist.)
Story structure tools don't work particularly well as blueprints -- the major failing of the (in)famous Save the Cat! is its relentless prescriptiveness in this regard -- but they can work well as lenses and, before writing, as brainstorming tools. You need to be able to tell who your protagonist is -- and, yes, there may be more than one, but you need to understand your story structure well enough to know whether you really do have a story with multiple protagonists. And if your answer to "what does your main character want" is "oh, nothing, really, they're just fine," then you need to at least consider the possibility that there is a problem with your story, not with the general principle that stories are about characters trying to resolve problems.
> I would absolutely argue that Frodo is the protagonist/hero of The Lord of the Rings.
I would say that The Lord of the Rings is the story of the defeat of Sauron, not a story of a hobbit making it alone to Mordor to single-handedly destroy the One Ring. Tolkien could have absolutely told the story while only focusing on Frodo, and only included characters like Sam, Aragorn, Gandalf, Merry, Pippin, Legolas, Gimli sporadically, mostly when they crossed Frodo's path (such as in The Fellowship of the Ring). He very deliberately chose not to do that.
In comparison, in Ocean's Eleven, the focus is always on Danny's plan. Sure, we get to see how the others are playing their part in the plan, but it's Danny's plan, and nothing in the story happens without a direct (at lest tangential) connection with him and the heist he orchestrated. There is nothing equivalent to the defense of Helm's Deep, the conquering of Isengard, the ride of the Rohirim and so on - entire hugely important plot points that have nothing whatsoever to do with Frodo's journey.
I would also add that it's not that hard to argue that, if you were to chose a single protagonist, it should be Aragorn, not Frodo - after all, the third and final book is named for him (The Return of the King) - the only character to have a whole book named for him. He also gets the most traditional, heroic ending - he is wed to the love of his life, and he rules with a just and rightful hand over the now purified world.
How do you know he's just? And why is it so rightful? Maybe it's my dislike of Aragorn as a character but who cares about who is the king of Gondor. The return of the king is a cute name for the third book, but obviously they couldn't name it "Frodo takes the ring to Mt Doom" because that would spoil too much. The return of the king is just the gambit that's used to distract Sauron while Frodo and Sam get the job done.
It's cool that Aragorn is the descendant of the traitorous and flawed royal line of Numenor, but it would be cooler if Aragorn had just went off with Arwen to hide in a crevice somewhere and let Faramir rule over Gondor, who certainly would be more loved by his people and seems to have a decent shot at uniting houses with Rohan.
Anyways, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Tolkien should have known that.
This is pretty much just a riff on the Hero's Journey which is a very common narrative structure, featured a lot in Jung's psychology and just about every (fantasy) epic.
Michael Moorcock hated the hero’s journey stuff and the identikit generic material it engendered. He wrote his fantasy fiction in ways that deliberately broke all the tropes and patterns, to great effect.
Should be paired with "Character Growth 101: It's This Easy".
- When the story starts, your character has a clear Want.
- Over the course of adventure, they discover what they actually Need.
- The Want and the Need are in conflict, and how they resolve that conflict changes them.
"Storytelling comes naturally to humans, but since we live in an unnatural world, we sometimes need a little help doing what we'd naturally do."
This reasoning doesn't follow, it's just a hollow appeal to nature. If people would work so well out of the box, they would not need parenting, and 10-20 years of that even.
I see, thanks! I wasn't aware that all this is a part of a larger something, Dan's name didn't ring a bell either. But of course, seeing how accomplished he' is in the industry, it makes sense that he knows about the Hero's Journey much better than a random drive-by commenter, such as myself, knows.
Dan Harmon is a great storyteller, but this system, and indeed all these "universal story structure" systems all either:
1) Are so generic they doesn't say anything useful (like a horoscope which fit everybody).
2) Only matches some select stories.
A good litmus test is if the system is compatible with Shakespeare's Hamlet. Given how populuar and well-regarded the play have been for centuries, we can safely say it is the system rather than the play which is at fault if the play does not fit the system.
We immediately notice that Hamlet does not "Then return to their familiar situation", since he dies (along with most other characters). Also it is not really clear he have changed. Indeed, the genre of tragedy does not match the requirement to have the protagonist safely home in the end, so Romeo and Juliet is also out. These are not obscure examples, these are the most famous and well-regarded plays in the English language.
TV-shows like Rick and Morty does tend to have the characters safely home in the end, so they can start in the "zone of comfort" in the next episode. On the other hand the characters rarely change. Even if they learn some lessons, they have usually forgotten them by start of the next episode. So I'm unsure if the system even matches Harmons own writing.
TV shows are addressed in a later part of the series, for exactly the reason you give.
It seems to give a good starting point for a bildungsroman/shonen manga/... (depending on the medium) type of story. The guide does seem unaware other type of stories exist.
The story structure that Dan shows is a distilled version of Joseph Campbell's Hero's journey.
A more get it done version.
Mind you, this isn't something that you have to follow. It's something that appears whenever you're telling a story. It's like gravity it's there even if you don't believe in it.
It's really not - it's something that appears if you want to follow the basic structure of most folk tales, that's it. The vast majority of stories diverge significantly from the Hero's Journey model, unless you deeply contrive to cast them as that.
There are plenty of examples in this thread, but to take a wide category, mystery novels almost never follow this structure. Just look at any of Agatha Christie's Poirot novels (some of the most read pieces of literature in history!) and see how badly they fit.
And this is not some kind of new phenomenon. Even something like Dante's Divine Comedy doesn't fit this, or even the Iliad.
The Divine Comedy is an archetypal Hero's Journey. Dante literally (literarily?) crosses the threshold, meets a guide (Virgil), jouneys to the depths of hell, meets the goddess (Beatrice), all the while struggling with the sins he's committed and the events of his life; in the end finding resolve.
The Divine Comedy begins with our hero in a place of great discomfort and fear. Then, he is taken on a journey where he is shown Hell, Purgatory, and at the end Heaven. Along the way, he only observes these places and is moved by them, but he never has to struggle or adapt, he only learns and understands. He pays no price for the journey, and in the end he sees God, is marveled by the beauty, and that's it - so no return. One could argue that the first-person style narrative implies a return to the world of the audience; on the other hand, since it is the metaphorical journey of a swimmer's soul to God, there is really no form of return.
So, out of the original Hero's Journey model, this only matches the call to adventure, the threshold, and perhaps the challenges and the transformation. Looking at Campbell's precise steps there is even less match with all his original steps.
> he never has to struggle or adapt, he only learns and understands
Learning and understanding is the struggle. Dante is tormented by a number of fears and doubts and he doesn't know how to deal with them. His journey into hell and heaven highlight aspects of these and helps him come to terms with them, one by one. The book ends with him having resolved that struggle, he could only see the face of god after reaching clarity.
There are a lot of ways you can interpret the book, but it's fundamentally a quest to find inner peace.
Sure, I can take that argument. But I still don't see any argument that makes the story run in a circle, any way to argue he returns at the end to where he begun, but changed, with some new insight.
By this logic any reaction to any challenging events is equivalent to overcoming in a story structure. I think this fits into stretching the original framework into meaninglessness.
The screenplay of Back to the Future is fun to compare with the original one[1] which lacks a Delorean, but had dull expository scenes, preaching about nuclear war and technical progress, a bit where Marty pirates videotapes and a lot of Coca Cola references.
Perhaps more relevant to the heros journey ideas, a major reason why the original is actually a really bad script is that stuff that happens for a reason in the final screenplay (going to school, attempting to invent rock and roll) is just Marty screwing around and ignoring advice (from the guy he trusts enough to drive into a nuclear test), and he doesn't really get the motivation to get his parents together until quite a bit later.
If you want to distill all stories, ever, to its atoms, you need only one bit: rise and fall. Of course a single bit (usually) makes a boring story, so combine at least two: rise & fall, or fall & rise. Now these are still pretty basic, it's best to take three, or four if you're daunting. You can make more, but at some point the reader will take a step and view a sequence of rises and falls as a single rise or fall.
Go ahead and try to apply this (admittedly a bit absurdist) scheme to any story known to mankind, ever.
The extreme version of this structure is Save The Cat[1] where each of the beats should happen on this page number of your script. Like others have mentioned these are largely based on the Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell.
Save the Cat specifies page numbers because scripts are formatted to one page/minute of screen time, and movies have ideal lengths.
If you can't turn to the exact center page and find the climax, the script is either formatted wrong (wasting your time) or written wrong (wasting your money).
Overall, when someone says _my favorite movie X_ doesn't fit this pattern or _legendary novel_ Y doesn't do this at all -- well, sometimes they might be right about that, but many, many non-linear movies and books still hit the beats Save the Cat describes.
One of the reasons models like this feel universal is because they have a lot of wiggle room in how you interpret what they mean.
So some movies fit them very plainly and other movies fit them only after somebody pulls a “well, actually” and makes an unobvious interpretation of who the story was really about, or what they wanted, or where they started, or where they ended.
The easiest starting points to look for the “hard fits” are in any tragedy (which aren’t very popular in the US recently), any movie that’s in the middle of a trilogy, and some absurdist/surrealist comedies that happened to win success on humor or novelty rather than structure.
But someone committed to the universality of this model can always make a case that those movies fit too. It’s just a more strained argument than in some others.
It's kind of funny because we already have a great storytelling model that does fit almost all of these (including lots of the more absurdist stuff), that is in 8-ish points: the 3-act structure!
I think that that's saying that these 8 points are an instance of the 3 act structure but loads of stories match the 3 act structure without matching this.
I think as a whole the mystery genre doesn’t use this model. So, say, Glass Onion right now. There’s a different but similar model for the whodunnit.
There are other movies that play with the model, like The Big Lebowski, in that it skips a lot of the character development on purpose. Things may try to move his world, but The Dude abides.
Inception and Tenet both do not follow this (you can try and stretch Cobb's narrative _a bit_ there but "in familiar situation and now not" is definitely not the thing).
Harry Potter is not this.
Despite what you might think, I think most Marvel movies don't really follow this! Sometimes a single character follows this and they end up being the tragic character.
Not a movie but I think we get to Romeo & Julliet and this doesn't work.
Jurassic Park is not this. Terminator is not this. The Terminal is not this.
Plenty of movies start out not so much with the protagonist in a zone of comfort wanting something, but being forced into something. E.g. Iron Man 1: that cave was not a zone of comfort.
You might argue that this structure applies e.g. to Avengers: Endgame, if you'd call "dealing with half of sentient life obliterated due to your failure to prevent it" a place of comfort.
But frankly, I think for most of the MCU, the stories are not due to a comfortable character wanting something more.
So, to answer your question: basically all movies in the most successful franchise ever diverge significantly from this formula. As does any other movie where the antagonist drives the plot significantly.
Pretty much any movie with a larger cast will typically only follow some version of this pattern for one character. For example, in Lord of the Rings, only Frodo fits this trope decently (and even for him, I would argue it fits quite poorly, especially since the "loses something important" step happens at the very end of the story). But Aragorn, Sam, Legolas, Merry and Pippin - their own journeys diverge quite a bit.
Or, look at The Avengers - how does this apply to The Hulk,for example?
Memento [1] is a pretty famous example of a movie which defies basically all structural prescriptions except for the basic flow of tension and resolution innate to all narratives.
If you enjoy this, I highly recommend the podcast Craig Mazin (writer of Chernobyl and The Last of Us) made about structuring movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSX-DROZuzY
"the common template of stories that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed."
I can't read any more hero stories, I've developed allergies.
And, let's go a little deeper into them:
a) They assume that there exists an area of comfort for characters, and the story will empower the reader to see it right at the beginning, so the story is asking the reader to make a judgement with incomplete data. (Do you like when your product manager asks you to estimate how long X will take?)
b) They "addict" the reader to this structure, which means writers who want to write other types of stories will be out of luck when it comes to their story being liked. Which takes me to
c) They shoe-horn the writer into writing a specific type of story. What if the writer is more interested in exploring a notion or a concept, but they don't want to do it through the exposition of the inner world/private life of a character? (like, should we understand US politics by following Donald Trump through his private life with camera, microphones and telepatic devices?)
> I can't read any more hero stories, I've developed allergies.
Given that the oldest stories we have are hero stories (e.g., Gilgamesh) and that the most successful stories of modern times are also hero stories (e.g., MCU), as well as pretty much every bit of fiction that has withstood the test of time in between, I would not expect that many share your opinion.
Actually, the stories that are by far the most successful in modern day, romance stories, don't follow this structure at all. Romance has its own fairly strict story structure and expected beats, to the point where the industry has its own jargon (HEA, aka the happily ever after, describes a common-enough ending structure such that some folks interpret as a lack of it being a disqualification for considering the story a romance story!)
Also, the many of the oldest stories we have also don't follow this structure. Consider traditional Australian Aboriginal storytelling, ancient Mayan storytelling, or even specific story structures in reference to current events: German storytelling had an entire genre that focused on postwar economic hardship and didn't at all follow hero stories. Thrillers rarely follow this structure, nor does horror.
One could maybe argue that "Titanic" (number 8) and "Beauty and the Beast" (number 18) are romances, but both of those also have strong action-adventure elements.
The first one I see that I would qualify as a pure romance is "My Big Fat Greek Wedding", all the way down at number 149.
- https://channel101.fandom.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Supe...
- https://channel101.fandom.com/wiki/Story_Structure_102:_Pure...
- https://channel101.fandom.com/wiki/Story_Structure_103:_Let%...
- https://channel101.fandom.com/wiki/Story_Structure_104:_The_...
- https://channel101.fandom.com/wiki/Story_Structure_105:_How_...
- https://channel101.fandom.com/wiki/Story_Structure_106:_Five...
[1]: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/34562930