Over the Garden Wall: Story Structure in 8 Steps

I’m obsessed with story structure right now. Last week I stumbled upon Dan Harmon‘s Channel 101 website, where he describes a simple 8 step structure, based on the observations and theories of Joseph Campbell.

He pares it down to it’s most basic, thus:

1. You            – A character is in a zone of comfort
2. Need         – But they want something
3. Go              – They enter an unfamiliar situation
4. Search       – Adapt to it
5. Find           – Find what they wanted
6. Take           – Pay its price,
7. Return       – And go back to where they started
8. Change      – Changed and capable of changing the world

During the same week I watched Over the Garden Wall with my kids, and as it felt like a nicely structured series I wanted to apply these steps to each episode, to see if it rings true, and to better understand how I might apply the system to my own work. It was a useful exercise and I had a couple of revelations along the way.

Dan Harmon says a TV series uses this structure slightly differently to a movie, the latter of which has a solid end, the former, needing to string out it’s ending across several episodes. Go and read it.

Today let’s look at Episode 1

****SPOILERS FOLLOW****

Episode 1: “The Old Grist Mill”

(1)You, (2) Need, (3) Go, (4) Search, (5) Find, (6) Take (cost), (7) Return, (8) Change

1. You, Wirt, are lost in the forest with your goofy little brother, Greg.
2. Need to find a way out of the forest
3. Go to the woodsman’s mill
4. Search – The whole series is a search, the primary goal being “get out of the woods”. Episode specific searches: (a) Greg looks for his frog, (b) Wirt looks inwards to search his feelings of melancholy, laying himself out on a therapist-style couch, and perhaps and perhaps (c) they want to learn if the woodsman is friend or foe
5. Find – (a) Greg finds his frog, and a ferocious hound, (b) Wirt blames his brother for his woes, (c) the woodsman is an ally; he tries to defend them against the hound
6. Take – They fix the hound, but (cost) wreck the mill. The woodsman sends them away (cost). Wirt blames his brother, but takes advice: that he is responsible (psycological cost)
7. Return: They continue to seek a way home.

Thoughts:

This episode needs to introduce a number of key characters and concepts and so priority was given to beats 1, 2 and 3.

We might also consider that this episode hangs open at beat 4, so that all the episodes that follow are the search phase: The series objective being the search for a way home. The next 8 episodes are a piece of beat 4, each is broken into a subset of the same 8 steps.

This open sequence will be closed by the last episode which is light on steps 1 – 4 but works hard at step 5 – 8 to wrap things up.

Thus Episodes 1 and 10 are the frame for the entire series, each placing emphasis on their appropriate halves of the 8 step cycle. We’ll look at that again when we get there.

Nevertheless, there is complete 8 step cycle, in this episode, with a search for a missing frog, the found frog and the found monster dog, the taken advice (Wirt is responsible for his and his brother’s behaviour) and the cost of the woodsman’s support. The woodsman knows it, and we will learn by and by that Wirt needs to take responsibility for his own actions. This is the first direct look at Wirt’s psychological problems.

Next time I’ll look at Episode 2, and we will start to see how each episode explores Wirt’s moral (external) or psychological (internal) problems, in quirky ways, that I frankly didn’t notice the first time watching, as we were just too busy enjoying the wackiness of the world and it’s characters.

I hope that made sense! Feel free to comment.