I’ve discussed before how Dan Harmon (creator of Community, co-writer for Monster House) has distilled the Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth into a very basic tool for describing the arcs of a story. Harmon prefers to see his story structure as a circle, whereas I believe that it is in fact a Cosine Wave. Since I’ve posted the above gif I’ve gotten quite a few notes about it and I thought I’d expand on my idea of why Harmon’s circle best fits a Cosine.
The whole left brain/right brain hypothesis seems to have been definitively disproved in recent days, which is good, because the more science the better. New science always leads me to the same question.
What does this mean for screenwriters?
Story is intuitive. Screenwriting is definitely not. You need all of your brain to do it properly, and now that we know there is no dominant half of your brain, the final barrier between you and your Oscar has been eliminated (thank you, science).
Intuitive screenwriting advice is clearly superior, because you can fit it all in a Community gif, but to quench the fiery thirst that remains in the rest of your neural network, here is Chrisdwoo.