Dan Harmon's Story Circle | Rick and Morty | adult swim

Dan Harmon shares the circular journey characters often take during a Rick and Morty episode.

#RickandMorty

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[alex_hiller]

Love hearing about storytelling methods from Bird Person.

[HedgeHogTail_]

I love how Dan Harman doesn't know if they swapped the right Jerry. Even he doesn't know which makes it even better.

[brunoromero]

I just realized Jerry got the same switcharoo situation that Beth did, but there wasn't any speculation or theories or further thought into it because no one cares about Jerry

[CrossGuy]

"Its a bad show"

Dan Harmon

[EmilyCarrollCello]

The hero's journey is like decorating a fancy wedding cake. Dan Harmon's story circle is the writers' equivalent of the Wilton cake decorating method. Professional bakers were making elaborate cakes for centuries, but the Wiltons designed better tools and figured out how to teach the basic elements in simple ways, so that anyone could learn how to make a beautiful birthday cake over the course of a few weekends. Nowadays, cake decorating is a very achievable hobby for a lot of busy people. Of course, only experience will make you an expert, but like the Wilton method, the story circle flattens the learning curve so you can create a viable product a lot sooner.

[stripes]

My favorite part is @2:48 where it confirms Jerry is a character so pathetic his creator doesn't even care enough to keep track of which version of Jerry is in a given situation.

[evilbritishguy]

I quite like Matt Stone and Trey Parker's advice on storytelling as well as this. As long as you can link each story beat with 'therefore', 'but' or 'meanwhile' instead of 'and then...', you can write almost anything you want.

[piratecheese]

"and we'll never know"
exactly like how we'll never know who is original Beth.

[DodaGarcia]

The story circle approach seems to work far better for Dan Harmon than for anyone else, because there seems to be a lot more to it that he understands intuitively and therefore can't really verbalize. It has clearly served him stupendously well, but it gets annoying when others try to teach it – the fact alone that everyone teaches it differently proves nobody really understands it as well as he does.

The most grating though is when folks forget it's a story outlining tool, not a story analysis tool, and insist in shoehorning this model in every single story that exists. There is more than one kind of story structure, and I'll bet anything that Dan is far more flexible about how he applies it than these people believe.

[alexisborder]

The message that I took away from this episode is that intervening with situations, even when your intentions are good, can sometimes make things worse, and that you need to step out of your emotional/moral bubble and look at things realistically before you act. As Jerry said in "Close Rickcounters of the Rick-kind", "If there's one thing I've learned in life, it's that before you get anywhere, you gotta stop listening to yourself.".

[KSIDDHESH]

I really love how they have constrains of the direction of the story, how the story is supposed to go fixed in the form of this story circle, but each and everytime they nail the story telling part of the episodes and none of it seems even a bit repetitive though all of it basically follows the same scheme/route.
Truly an inspiration.

[SpawkenToons]

We now know that Jerry actually got swapped 😅

[j.michaelmiller]

This sounds pretty much exactly like The Hero's Journey. I do like the idea of a circle instead though (basically same thing in a different way for people who might grasp it better)

[ashantisimons]

The genuine genius of this. I use it to plot my stories, and understand stories I love. It's amazing what's in your mind dan

[cuujo]

*laughs*
"It's s bad show. It's a bad show for kids." lmao

[rickestofricks]

in other words time old classic storytelling technique called the heroes journey

[eliasfarah]

this is legendary
used in community and worked perfectly
and now the same is happening with Rick and morty

[enkryptron]

At this point in the show, everyone has been swapped with different versions of themselves across time and space.

[johnmrudy]

So glad this video got re-upped! I was missing it

[poopingducks]

"He may have gotten switched with another Jerry and we'll never know." So about that...