Fiction Made Simple: A Fundamental Framework for Storytelling

Stories are built from three essential questions—and once you learn to recognize them, storytelling becomes clearer, more flexible, and far less mysterious.

Storytelling Made Simple: A Foray into Forms and Fiction is an invitation to step inside story structure in a way that feels intuitive, grounded, and usable. In this four-week course, I’ll guide you through a simple, adaptable framework for understanding how stories move, shift, and hold a reader’s attention, using examples and prompts you can immediately apply to your own writing.

At the center of the course is a core idea I return to again and again in my teaching and writing: that most stories can be understood through three fundamental lenses: What is happening? What did happen? What is going to happen? Each week, we’ll focus on one of these modes, studying how it appears in published work and practicing how to use it in your own fiction. You’ll generate a short piece of writing in every class, experiment with how different storytelling modes shape meaning, and receive real-time feedback—both from your peers and from me—as you work.

In our final week, we’ll look at what happens when these modes combine, overlap, and warp—revealing how more complex narrative structures are built from simple foundations. By the end of the course, you’ll leave with new work, a clearer understanding of how stories are constructed, and a flexible framework you can return to whenever you sit down to write.

Who This Course Is For

This course is ideal for beginners and for writers returning to fiction after time away who want a clear, supportive way back into storytelling. If you’ve ever wanted structure to feel illuminating rather than limiting, this course is for you.

Learning and Writing Goals

Learning Goals 

In this course, you will:

• Learn three common modes of storytelling.
• Study examples of how these modes manifest in published works.
• Practice how to incorporate these modes into your work.

Writing Goals 

In this course, you will:

• Do a deep dive into a different storytelling mode each class.  
• Generate a short piece of fiction each week.
• Receive real time feedback in class from me and your peers.
• Receive written feedback on your work from me.

Zoom Schedule

We will meet on Zoom each week on Sundays from 7-8 PM Eastern.

Weekly Syllabus

Week 1: Intro and What is happening? 

We will discuss and dive into stories framed around the question of “What is happening?” We will then write our own pieces with this concept as the driving plot factor.

Week 2: What happened? 

We will discuss and dive into stories framed around the question of “What happened?” We will then write our own pieces with this concept as the driving plot factor.

Week 3: What is going to happen?

We will discuss and dive into stories framed around the question of “What is going to happen?” We will then write our own pieces with this concept as the driving plot factor.

Week 4: What is, what was and what will, combining these modes

We will discuss and dive into stories that incorporate two or more of these modes at once and will study and practice more advanced techniques in story construction.

Click the Enroll Now button below, enter your details on the Checkout page,
and reserve your spot in the course.

$345.00 Original price was: $345.00.$295.00Current price is: $295.00.Enroll Now