Every Story Is the Same (Or Is It?)

Version 1.0

👨‍🏫 Introduction

Here are two claims that can't both be comfortable: almost every story you love has the same shape — and that shape might be a prison. Knowing both arguments turns you from a consumer of stories into a designer of them. (It also explains why AI is so good at generating stories and so bad at surprising you with one: the shape is all over its training data.)

🔄 The case FOR one shape: the story circle

In the 15-minute video “Every Story Is the Same”, Will Schoder traces one pattern from Joseph Campbell's “hero's journey” (1949) through Disney story analyst Christopher Vogler's famous studio memo to TV writer Dan Harmon's 8-step story circle — the version below, with examples you know:

Comfort zone. A character in their familiar world — Moana on Motunui, Luke on the moisture farm.
Need. They want something — the ocean calls; the droid carries a message.
Enter the unfamiliar. They cross a threshold — Miles Morales gets bitten; Chihiro walks into the bathhouse.
Adapt. The road of trials — training montages live here.
Get what they wanted. The goal is reached — Nemo is found; the heart of Te Fiti is in hand.
Pay a heavy price. It costs them — a mentor dies; the win rings hollow.
Return to the familiar. Back home…
…having changed. The world is the same; they are not.

Schoder's point isn't that writers copy each other — it's that this circle keeps reappearing because it mirrors how humans experience change: leave comfort, struggle, return transformed. That's why it fits Finding Nemo, Breaking Bad, Zelda, and probably your favorite story too. Try it — that's the exercise below.

⛓️ The case AGAINST: the narrative prison

In the Aeon essay “Our narrative prison” (2025), writer and radio producer Eliane Glaser asks: if we truly live in an age of infinite choice, why does nearly everything follow this one arc? Her key arguments:

The formula survives by hiding. Every film opens with a fresh premise, so we never notice we're riding the same submerged track — a theme-park ride whose only destination is home.
There's an industry selling it. Screenwriting gurus (Robert McKee, Syd Field, Vogler's memo-turned-book) profit from teaching one replicable recipe for box-office success — so Hollywood keeps buying stories shaped like the recipe.
The ending is secretly conservative. The final-act “reset” dramatizes change while restoring the status quo — the hero transforms, the world doesn't. Glaser sees this pattern even in films marketed as rebellious.
It's one culture's shape, not THE shape. Filmmaker Naqqash Khalid calls the lone-hero quest a Western, male, colonial conception; Ursula K. Le Guin's “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” proposes stories shaped like containers (gathering, holding, relating) instead of spears (hunting, conquering); critic Jane Alison points to shapes from nature — waves, meanders, fractals, networks.
But even Glaser concedes the circle's pull: abandoning structure entirely, she writes, may be “neither desirable nor possible” — the goal is to see the scaffolding so you can choose it, bend it, or build otherwise.

🔓 Optional exercise: the prison break (10 minutes)

Pick a story you love. Map it onto the 8-step circle. (It will probably fit — notice how that feels.)
Now stage an escape: redesign one structural element using an idea from the counterargument — a carrier-bag story with no quest, a meander with no climax, a passive protagonist, an ending that refuses the reset.
Write 2–3 sentences describing your redesigned story and post it to the class channel. Vote 🔓 for the escape that most makes you want to watch it anyway.

💡 That last vote is the hard question: can a story break the shape and still be one you'd finish? That tension is exactly what Task 8's structure-level option asks you to storyboard.

⛑️ Recommendations

The circle is a lens, not a law. Use it to see stories, not to stamp them out.
Going deeper: the full Glaser essay is an 18-minute read and worth it; the Schoder video's examples reward a second watch with the circle in hand.