Story Circle Template

Dan Harmon, the creator of Community and Rick and Morty, took Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, stripped out the mystical vocabulary, and reduced it to eight steps arranged around a circle. He has used it to plan almost every episode of two long-running television shows. It is one of the most efficient plotting tools ever devised, and the reason it works is that it forces you to articulate the protagonist's psychological movement as well as the external events.

The Story Circle is shaped like a clock. The protagonist starts at the top (Step 1: A character is in a zone of comfort), moves clockwise through descent, change, and return, and arrives back where they started -- changed. The circular shape is not decorative. It is the point. You leave home; you go through trials; you bring something back; and what you bring back transforms the home you returned to.

This template walks you through all eight steps, explains what each one accomplishes, and helps you map your story onto the circle. It works for episodes, short stories, and novels. It scales: you can use it to plan a 22-minute sitcom or a 400-page book.

Step 1: You (A character is in a zone of comfort)

Establish your protagonist in their comfort zone. "Comfort" here does not mean happy. It means familiar. The protagonist may be miserable, lonely, or stuck, but the misery is the kind they know how to survive. They have made peace with it, even if the peace is shabby. This is the equilibrium the story is about to disturb.

The zone of comfort tells us who the character is and what they are protecting. It also creates the contrast against which the story's transformation will be measured. A character whose comfort zone is "lying alone in a quiet apartment surrounded by half-read books" is on a different journey from one whose comfort zone is "drinking with the same three friends at the same bar every Friday."

What to write here: Describe the protagonist's current life. What is the unspoken peace they have made with their circumstances? What is the cost of that peace?

Step 2: Need (They want something)

The protagonist's comfort is disturbed by a desire. They want something they do not yet have -- love, knowledge, justice, freedom, revenge, a parent's approval, a sandwich. The want can be petty or monumental. What matters is that it is specific enough to drive action.

Harmon distinguishes between the conscious want (what the protagonist will say they want if asked) and the unconscious need (what they actually have to acquire to be whole). These are usually different. The want is "I want the promotion." The need is "I want to stop measuring my worth by my title." A good story will deliver one of these and not the other, and the difference between them is the engine of the arc.

What to write here: Articulate the conscious want as a sentence the protagonist could say. Articulate the unconscious need separately. How will the difference between them create complications?

Step 3: Go (They enter an unfamiliar situation)

The protagonist crosses a threshold. They step into a new context where the rules of the comfort zone no longer apply. The unfamiliar situation can be a literal new place (a new city, a stranger's house, an enemy stronghold) or a psychological one (a new relationship, a new role, a new responsibility).

The "unfamiliar" part is important. The protagonist should not arrive equipped to handle this situation. They should feel out of their depth -- exhilarated, disoriented, or terrified, but emphatically not comfortable. This is the section where the protagonist's old habits start to fail and they begin to look for new ones.

What to write here: What is the unfamiliar situation? What makes it unfamiliar -- physically, socially, emotionally? What old skill stops working?

Step 4: Search (They adapt to it)

The protagonist tries to get what they want by adapting to the new world. They learn its rules, make alliances, experiment, fail, try again. This is the bulk of the second quarter of the story, and it is where most of the action and surface-level pleasure of the story lives.

The protagonist will appear to be making progress here. They are getting closer to the want, picking up skills, building a team, looking competent. The reader should believe the want is achievable. That belief is what will make Step 5 land.

What to write here: What does the protagonist try? What works, and what fails? Which allies do they pick up, and what do those allies bring?

Step 5: Find (They get what they wanted)

The protagonist gets the thing they wanted. The promotion is offered, the lover says yes, the enemy is defeated, the treasure is found. This is often the midpoint of the story, and it is almost always a false victory.

Harmon's insight here is that getting what you want is usually not the same as getting what you need. The protagonist achieves the conscious want and discovers that the satisfaction is hollow, conditional, contaminated, or temporary. The shape of the story is about to flip. From this point on, the protagonist will start paying for what they got.

What to write here: What does the protagonist obtain? In what way is it not what they hoped it would be? What is now revealed about the true cost?

Step 6: Take (They pay a heavy price for it)

The cost of the victory comes due. Whatever the protagonist did to get what they wanted has consequences they did not anticipate. They have wronged someone, betrayed something, exposed themselves, or set in motion a force they cannot control. The bill arrives, and they cannot pay it without losing something they did not realise mattered.

This is the structural twin of "Bad Guys Close In" plus "All Is Lost" in Save the Cat, compressed into one step. The protagonist's situation deteriorates rapidly. Allies turn or fall away. The lie they have been telling themselves becomes impossible to sustain. By the end of this step, the protagonist should be lower than they have ever been -- not because the universe is cruel, but because their own choices have caught up with them.

What to write here: What is the cost the protagonist pays for getting the want? What does it reveal about who they have been? What is taken from them in the process?

Step 7: Return (They go back to their familiar situation)

The protagonist returns to the world they started from, but they bring something with them: a hard-won insight, a tool, a relationship, a renewed sense of who they want to be. This step is sometimes mistaken for the climax. It is not. It is the structural movement that makes the climax possible. The protagonist re-enters the familiar context carrying everything they learned in the unfamiliar one.

"Familiar situation" does not always mean literal home. It can mean returning to a relationship they had left, a city they had fled, a role they had abandoned, or simply a state of mind they had outgrown. The point is that the protagonist is now in a position to apply what they learned where it matters most.

What to write here: How does the protagonist return -- physically, relationally, psychologically? What do they carry back with them?

Step 8: Change (Having changed)

The protagonist demonstrates the change. They make a choice, take an action, speak a truth, or refuse a temptation that proves the journey was real. The change is not stated; it is shown. The reader sees the new self acting where the old self could not have.

This is the climax. Everything the protagonist learned converges in a single decisive moment. After it, the world resets at a new equilibrium -- the new "zone of comfort" that Step 1 implicitly promised. The character is at the top of the circle again, but the top of the circle is no longer the same place it was at the beginning.

What to write here: What specific action or choice demonstrates the change? How is the new equilibrium different from the original one? What is the final image that proves it?

The Half-Circle Hinges

Harmon often points out that the circle has two natural axes: the vertical one (comfort at top, descent at bottom) and the horizontal one (familiar on the left, unfamiliar on the right). Some writers find it useful to think about which axis their story is most heavily emphasizing. A story about leaving home is moving primarily across the horizontal. A story about character collapse and rebuilding is moving primarily down the vertical.

If your draft feels off, ask: which half of the circle is doing too much work, and which is being skipped? An undercooked Step 7 (the return) is the single most common Story Circle problem. The protagonist defeats the dragon and the story ends -- but the change has not yet been brought home to the place that needed it.

How to Customize This Template

• For television episodes: The Story Circle was built for episodic television, and it shines at this scale. A 22-minute or 44-minute episode can comfortably hit all eight steps. Use the framework for each episode while letting the season's arc carry its own larger Circle.
• For short stories: Compress the middle. Steps 3-5 can collapse into a single sustained scene. The Circle still works -- it just spins faster.
• For novels: Treat the Circle as a chapter-level skeleton. Each step gets several scenes. Be generous with Step 4 (the search) and Step 6 (the cost) -- these are where novels earn their length.
• For ensemble stories: Each major character can run their own Circle, with the steps timed so that characters' down-moments and up-moments interleave. This is how prestige television keeps tension distributed across a large cast.
• For negative arcs: The Circle still works, but Step 8 inverts. The protagonist returns having failed to change, or having changed in the wrong direction. The new equilibrium is worse than the old. The tragic version of the Circle is just as structurally complete as the positive one.

Plot your story on Plotiar's flowchart. Lay out the eight steps as connected nodes, attach a scene document to each one, and watch the circle close as your story takes shape. Try it free.