Rick and Morty writer’s room

I wanted to figure out how does the process of writing a Rick and Morty episode look like, and here’s the information I could assemble.

They have 3 boards in the writer’s room:

1. Brainstorming board

They start by brainstorming episode ideas and writing them down on the board.

These are general high concept story ideas that look like this:

2. Story Circle board

Then they work on a rough story outline. They use Dan Harmon’s story circle that represents the simplified version of Campbell’s Hero’s journey, and looks like this:

You can read more about it in the awesome series of articles about the story structure that he wrote, here you can read about the process of breaking a story in more details, and here Dan explains this process using a Community episode as an example.

Sometimes, there are several circles for different characters or storylines.

If you look closely, you can see that they also have a print out of Campbell’s monomyth on their board.

Here’s how the breakdown of the “Close Rick-Counters” episode look like:

Outline

Finally they create an outline of the episode, these are just 2 acts broken down into scenes for A and B stories.