Dan Harmon's Story Circle, Step by Step

Dan Harmon's Story Circle is an eight-step story structure drawn on a circle: "A character is in a zone of comfort, but they want something. They enter an unfamiliar situation, adapt to it, get what they wanted, pay a heavy price for it, then return to their familiar situation, having changed." Harmon boiled the eight steps down to single words: You, Need, Go, Search, Find, Take, Return, Change.

Harmon, the writer behind the sitcom Community (Wired, 2011), set it out in a series of Story Structure tutorials for Channel 101, the monthly short-film night he ran in Los Angeles with Rob Schrab. The tutorials survive in the Internet Archive as they stood in March 2005, and every quote on this page is from them.

What Are the 8 Steps of the Story Circle?

Harmon's first tutorial starts with drawing it: "Draw a circle and divide it in half vertically. Divide the circle again horizontally." Number the four points where the lines meet the circle 1, 3, 5 and 7, clockwise from 12 o'clock, and the quarters between them 2, 4, 6 and 8 (Story Structure 101). Then the eight steps, in his words:

The one-word version is from Story Structure 103, where he writes the last word in capitals: "You, Need, Go, Search, Find, Take, Return, CHANGE." The headings are from the two parts of Story Structure 104.

"Story Circle" is the name the method goes by now. In the tutorials themselves, Harmon just calls it the circle.

What Do the Top and Bottom Halves Mean?

The horizontal line splits two worlds. "Everything in grey on that circle, the bottom half, is a 'special world' where that movie poster starts being delivered, and everything above this line is the 'ordinary world'" (Story Structure 104, part 1). The "movie poster" is whatever the story promises: the shark, the werewolf, the romance.

So step 3 crosses the line going down, steps 4 to 6 happen below it, and step 7 crosses back up. Harmon calls the whole shape "that pattern of descent and return, diving and emerging."

He grounds it in two rhythms (Story Structure 102). For the mind: "Conscious-unconscious-conscious-unconscious-etc." For society: "Order-chaos-order-chaos-etc." Both map to the same top and bottom. They are not a second line across the circle.

Is the Story Circle the Hero's Journey?

It is Harmon's compression of it. He takes headings from Joseph Campbell: the Road of Trials at step 4 and the Meeting with the Goddess at step 5, and his step 8, Master of Both Worlds, echoes Campbell's Master of the Two Worlds. Of step 4 he writes, "I prefer to stick with Joseph Campbell's title, 'The Road of Trials,' because it's less specific" (Story Structure 104, part 1), and of step 5, "I'm using the phrase 'meeting with the goddess' because Joseph Campbell thought about these things longer and harder than me" (Story Structure 104, part 2).

Where Campbell's hero's journey has seventeen stages in three parts, Harmon keeps eight. The hero's journey structure covers Campbell's original and the twelve-stage version most writers know.

What Does Each Step Need?

The detail in Story Structure 104 is where the circle becomes usable:

• You. "If we are not inside a character, then we are not inside the story." Show the character early, and don't bounce between characters for too long before settling on one.
• Need. Something is off balance. A call to adventure can come here, and the hero may refuse it, but "the 'refusal of the call' is not a necessary ingredient."
• Go. The story's promise starts. "Step 1, you are the sheriff of a small town. Step 2, strange bites on a murder victim's body. Step 3, holy shit, it's a werewolf."
• Search. "Our protagonist has been thrown into the water and now it's sink or swim." Harmon warns against reading this as a literal training montage.
• Find. The bottom of the circle, "a very, very special pivot point": a time for "major revelations, and total vulnerability." If the story has a twist, "twist here and twist hard."
• Take. "There are major, major consequences to that decision." This half of the circle has its own road of trials, the road back up.
• Return. The way out of the special world, easy for some characters, a chase for others.
• Change. The hero is back where they started, "forever changed and forever capable of creating change."

He is clear that the circle is the structure and the details are yours: "There are some exceptions to everything, but that's called style, not structure."

How Do You Find a Story's Ending With the Circle?

Look across it. Harmon points out that step 3 is the opposite of step 7, step 5 the opposite of step 1, and step 8 the opposite of step 4. His advice for an ending that feels earned: "When in doubt, look at the opposite side of the circle." Whatever the hero picked up on the road of trials at step 4 is what saves them at step 8, and because it was set up below the line, it isn't a coincidence: "Why is this not Deus Ex Machina? Because we earned it."

That symmetry is also why the circle sits well beside a character arc: the change at step 8 answers the comfort at step 1.

How Do You Outline the Story Circle in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app, and its Outliner board turns the circle into a plan you can write into.

1. Open the Outliner on the Draft and add eight cards, in order, with Add › Scene: You, Need, Go, Search, Find, Take, Return, Change.
2. In each card's synopsis, write what happens at that step in your story.
3. Mark the bottom half. Open one of the special-world cards, make a label called "Special world" (the pencil beside Status in the Inspector's Properties opens Edit labels & statuses), and set it on Search, Find and Take. Go and Return cross the line, so leave them unmarked or give them a label of their own.
4. Switch the Outliner to its list to see all eight steps as rows, each with its synopsis and label.
5. Check your ending against step 4, and your step 5 against step 1, the way Harmon suggests.
6. Each card is a document: open one and write. When a step needs several scenes, use a folder for it instead, and put the scenes inside. The Outliner moves them around as the draft changes.

If you'd rather work with acts and plot points, the same board holds a three-act outline.

Common Mistakes

• Drawing order and chaos as a second line. In Harmon's tutorials, conscious and unconscious, order and chaos, and the ordinary and special worlds are all the same top-and-bottom split.
• Making step 5 a plain victory. The hero gets what they wanted, and step 6 is where they "pay a heavy price for it."
• Skipping the return. Harmon's caveman version ends "we need RETURN and we need CHANGE." A story that stays in the special world hasn't closed the circle.
• Treating step 4 as a training montage. He calls this out by name; the point is "sink or swim."
• Quoting Harmon as calling it the "Story Circle". The name came later; his tutorials say circle.

Sources

Retrieved 17 October 2026. Harmon's tutorials are cited from the Internet Archive's copies of channel101.com, captured in March 2005.

• Dan Harmon, Story Structure 101: Super Basic Shit, Channel 101.
• Dan Harmon, Story Structure 102: Pure, Boring Theory, Channel 101.
• Dan Harmon, Story Structure 103: Let's Simplify Before Moving On, Channel 101.
• Dan Harmon, Story Structure 104: The Juicy Details, part 1, Channel 101.
• Dan Harmon, Story Structure 104: The Juicy Details, part 2, Channel 101.
• Channel 101, About Channel 101 (archived 2005).
• Brian Raftery, How Dan Harmon Drives Himself Crazy Making Community, Wired (2011).