Show it with a definable moment, advises Harmon. Via our experiment, our understanding was transformed (4) by gaining this new, hitherto-unknown knowledge (5). To paraphrase Harmon’s words here: we started from a position of safety and comfort (1), but a lack of completion (2) drew us to a question (3) and we were pulled across a threshold into the unknown. What did you find? Don’t be afraid to say, we found nothing – particularly if your trials were designed well enough that you can say that conclusively. …In other words, the results of your research. This is a time for major revelations, and total vulnerability The purpose here has become refreshingly – and frighteningly – simple. Your reader needs to know the tools with which you are going to approach your call to adventure, and they need to know this as quickly and efficiently as possible. You’ve crossed the threshold, the adventure has begun “our protagonist has been thrown into the water and now it’s sink or swim”. Is there a more fitting descriptor for a methods section? Harmon talks here of how, in ‘ Hero with a Thousand Faces’, Joseph Campbell “evokes the image of a digestive tract, breaking the hero down, divesting him of neuroses, stripping him of fear and desire”.
#DAN HARMON STORYWRITING MOVIE#
Our movie poster is not the results, but the question. The threshold we are crossing here is between defining our knowledge gap, and attempting to rectify that gap with further research. Harmon says here to figure out what your ‘movie poster’ is that maybe doesn’t work as an analogy for scientists, as we have a tendency to front-load presentations of our research with the results. You are now entering an unfamiliar situation, because that’s what science is about: driving into uncharted territory, in search of something more. Your job here is to show the reader what’s missing, what the gap in your knowledge is.
We could always understand things better than we currently do. By bringing others into your zone at the beginning of the story, this is how your reader identifies with you. But you do have to establish the ‘zone of comfort’: the current state of research in your field. You don’t need to flesh it out any more than that. In fact, the context of a research paper means your reader instinctively knows who the protagonist is: a scientist, pluckily trying to advance their field. You are taking the reader on a journey with you. But you came up with the question, you designed the experiment, you carried it out, and you are presenting and interpreting the results.
I agree, in that your research should not be carried out with an agenda. Who is the protagonist in a research paper? This is – on the face of it – a tricky question, particularly as we are often taught to write in a weird passive (third-person?) voice, resulting in bizarrely disjointed sentences. The crusade against such an impersonal style includes things like the ‘by zombies’ meme, but still some people push it for reasons like ‘the focus should be on the results’, or ‘science should be impartial’. Let’s go through the steps, and see how this structure might relate to the typical academic paper. I’ve taken most of this from Harmon’s notes on the Channel 101 page on story structure, and it’s worth going through that to see some more examples of how some of our favourite movies (ok, he mostly focuses on Die Hard) fit the pattern. That may be so, but don’t you want your readers to also enjoy reading about it? If your paper isn’t compelling, then will it even leave a lasting impression? “But my paper is about SERIOUS RESEARCH,” you might say. It got me thinking about whether research papers fit this kind of pattern, whether they should, and also whether thinking about such a pattern when developing our papers would help structure them better. The structure itself is pretty simple: a circle, divided and numbered as below, with each number representing a step on our journey.
The REAL structure of any good story is simply circular – a descent into the unknown and eventual return – and that any specific descriptions of that process are specific to you and your story.
#DAN HARMON STORYWRITING TV#
I’m a big fan of the work of Dan Harmon, writer of amazing tv shows like Community and Rick & Morty, and I’ve often heard him talk on his podcast (‘ Harmontown’) about his ‘story circle’: a pattern to which most good stories conform. 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.
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