The Story Circle · 2:21am Mar 21st, 2017
Dan Harmon's Story Circle is a streamlined version of the Monomyth (otherwise known as The Hero's Journey). It's the essential, underlying structure to every story, and it's something we (humans) construct naturally even without any conscious awareness of it. The more a story sticks to this structure, the greater the impact it will have on its audience. For a prime example, you need look no further than this breakdown of Star Wars--a story of epic proportions that has captivated multiple generations, and will likely endure as a subject of historical study in the same way that Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and The Iliad have.
Humans are storytellers. Our early ancestors made sense of a strange and unforgiving world through their stories. And we still do this today. There is a story inside all of us, a story that struggles to be told--to be heard and re-told. The most successful stories have built empires which last until other stories topple it.
When I was young--eleven or twelve years old--I made my first attempt at writing a story. It was bad, but at the time all I knew of the world was but a caricature, a shadow cast upon me by the glow of a CRT television and the low-budget stories that turn-of-the-century networks produced for broadcast. Some of my fondest memories are of watching Star Trek: Voyager with my mother and sister, but as I've grown older, I can't bear to watch most of those stories anymore. It's no wonder I wasn't able to tell a good story back then.
With age, and with repeated attempts through the decades, I eventually honed my story into Sweet Nothings. What I think sets that story apart from all my previous attempts is that I'm actually able to stand reading it myself, and I'll admit, I still look back on it every now and again. It's a story that hasn't yet left me, and I feel it gnawing at me from somewhere deep inside me. It beckons me to tell it better, and I toy with the idea of stripping away the fanfiction elements of it to make it truly my own story--something unshackled from a niche community and free to spread among the wider population.
It took me two years, and the help of more than a few editors, to hammer Sweet Nothings into the story it is today. And in that time, I found myself gutting half of what I'd written and re-writing the first act entirely in order to focus the story on the important parts. The scars of that rewrite show themselves, especially in the first half of the second act. It was a part of the story that I knew was rushed at the time, but I simply didn't have it in me to cut and suture another chapter to make it pretty.
Sweet Nothings was exhausting, even painful at times to write. So I struggle now, close to three years later, with trying to revisit it. There are times when I feel as if this story may be the most important thing I can do with my life; a silly thought to have in regard to a pony fic, but already it plagues me with dreams of transplanting it to one of the worlds of the TRAPPIST-1 system.
What's a bald ape to do?
Enter the Story Circle. If I'm to tell a better story, I need to understand story-telling better. So as an exercise, I'm going to try my best to break Sweet Nothings apart and map it to the eight points of the circle. Where it fits, I'll know what I have right. Where it doesn't fit, I'll know what I have wrong and why.
1. You
2. Need
3. Go
4. Search
5. Find
6. Take
7. Return
8. Change
(1) A story told in first person, Lucky Day is the protagonist. He's the character the story follows, though I have to admit that for the vast majority of the story, he has very little agency. This is largely intentional, as he's a projection of myself, and agency is something I've struggled with in my own life. This doesn't make for a very interesting protagonist, though.
(2) What does Day need? This is one I have trouble with--an immediate sign that this part of the story is weak, and this is an important part to get right early on because it's what makes the audience invested in the protagonist's struggle. Day needs a lot of things right off the bat--food, water, shelter--but none of these are what drives the story. And while after some thought, I can pinpoint what Day needs, it's never really obvious in the story.
Day is alone. What he needs are friends, family, and a home--somewhere to belong. That this never really gets attention in the story is possibly the most damning flaw it has. This also happens to be one of my own problems in life, and something I was blind to until very recently, so it's not surprising Day is blind to it himself.
(3) This is where the hero plunges from his familiar world into the adventure of his life. Day begins the story as an exile, and this is one part of the story I think I got right--even given that I neglected (2). Day's exile is a traumatic event, and I spend the first ~9k words hammering this home. The very first chapter--Parturition--describes his leaving of the stable as a birth; he leaves the familiar comfort of the only home he's ever known and ventures into a hostile world. Rake echoes this metaphor soon after when he describes his own exile (implied to be under similar circumstances to Day's) as a birth where he emerges "kicking and screaming and covered in blood". (As a subtle clue that things aren't as they seem, he also notes that Day is "still clean as a newborn".)
Day is then taken captive, beaten, and ultimately released in Get a Good Night's Sleep and Always Tell the Truth. And I'm not sure if this fits better as part of (3) or (4). Maybe what it does most is provide a transition from (3) into (4)? Day goes through a microcosm of his former life: locked away in the dark (the stable), abusive mother figure, and a young boy he feels the need to protect (I like to think Day would get along well with Holden Caulfield), and then another "birth" of sorts. Each one of the "births" so far also carries a counterpoint of death--Day is exiled because of a murder, as is Rake, and when Grift releases Day, he finds only the "long-dead skeletal remains" of a family. (3) is the transition from the familiar to the strange--the waking world to the ream of dreams--from life to death. But (4) is the stripping away of what's holding the protagonist back. Here that begins when Day is reduced to struggling for his own survival.
The problem the story has with (4) is the same problem it has with (2)--Day doesn't know what he's looking for. He's stuck living from one moment to the next. He can't look back, and he doesn't know how to look ahead. (Aside: it occurs to me now that Grift's monologue about sniping and "seeing the future" could have been used to highlight this failing in Day.)
(5) Ostensibly, meeting Starry and Chris is what Day is looking for, but this happens while the story is still in the Road of Trials. Honestly, the true midpoint of the story--the Meeting with the Goddess--is Day's intimate liaison with Chrys near the end of Don't Stay Up All Night (the Lost Chapter). But at around 70-80% of the way through the story, this is more than a little off the mark. When I originally planned out this story, there was supposed to be a lot more that came after, but when I got around to writing It's Okay to Cry, I realized there wasn't anything left to say in the story, so that's where it ended. Day doesn't realize he's found what he needs until then either, which explains why (6) (7) and (8) are crammed together in the last two chapters.
(6) Here, I prefer to think in terms of the "heavy price" that's paid for what the protagonist needed--Day has to sacrifice his former home and family in order to take his place with his new home and family. This comes all the way at the end of the story in Don't Play with Fire.
(7) It's tempting to think of The Return as going back to the stable, and that's obviously how I thought of it when I wrote it, but the only way (6) can work is if the return home comes after the sacrifice. And since the sacrifice is his old home, Day's return can only be to his new home. Noteworthy here is that this takes the form of another life-death transition in Day's suicide attempt--a final "birth" and this time he's actually "kicking and screaming and covered in blood."
(8) Day has changed, but his changes lack emphasis. Throughout the story, Day hides himself from others--he's afraid to let them see how he's suffering, and he feels compelled to wear a mask in order to "get along" like his former life trained him to. Most of all, he's unable to smile genuinely--always a forced smile because he's never happy. At the end, he cries openly and confesses everything to Starry. His face is his own--bloodshot eyes and a snot-dripping nose. He still isn't happy, but the faintest bit of a true smile creeps out when his surrogate mother tells him he has a home. All of that is given only a few paragraphs at the very end, but it's all given without much contrast to how he was before.
I'm actually more than a little surprised that I was able to fit Sweet Nothings to the Story Circle as well as I did, considering that I made zero conscious effort to write it that way. The biggest structural failing appears to be the aimless and meandering first "half" which takes up about three quarters of the story. The protagonist himself is aimless and meandering through that part of the story as well. Again, this was largely intentional, but if/when I do it over again, I'll find a way to have my cake and eat it too so that audiences will have a better time following Day on his journey.
Because I have changed, and writing Sweet Nothings the first time was a big part of that journey.
trappist.one is a cool website
4469926 it's a cool star system. Literally--the star puts out so little energy that the day side of one of its planets would be only as bright as twilight on earth.