Weekly Breakdown
Week 1 – Subplots
Students learn how subplots can support or contrast the main plot, adding complexity, theme, and tension to the overall story.
Week 2 – Themes
Students explore how even fast-paced genre stories carry deeper themes like justice, identity, or family—and how to weave those ideas in subtly.
Week 3 – Epistolary Stories
Students experiment with creative structures like letters, journal entries, lists, or timestamps to discover new ways to tell a story.
Week 4 – Symbolism and Repetition
Students learn how repeated objects, phrases, or images can gain meaning over time and create emotional resonance for the reader.
Week 5 – Timelines
Students practice using flashbacks to reveal new information and reshape how the reader understands the present moment of the story.
Week 6 – Tension
Students learn how to raise the stakes in any situation—whether life-or-death or totally ordinary—by increasing pressure and complication.
Week 7 – Pacing
Students explore how sentence length and paragraph structure can slow down or speed up a scene to match a character’s emotion.
Week 8 – Tropes
Students identify common storytelling tropes and learn how to twist or subvert expectations to surprise the reader in satisfying ways.
Week 9 – Writing Emotion
Students focus on the emotional core of their stories, learning how to channel real-life feelings into fictional characters and scenes.
Week 10 – Tone
Students revise their writing to enhance tone, learning how rhythm, word choice, and repetition shape the mood of a scene.
Week 11 – Story Planning
Students organize all their ideas into a detailed story plan, including plot structure, subplot, character arc, and pacing.
Week 12 – Final Story
Students write a polished final story that showcases everything they’ve learned—complex structure, emotional resonance, strong pacing, and intentional voice.