What Makes a Good Story: How to Write a Story Readers Will Love

In order to write a great story, we must first discover what makes stories great. In this 4-week FLEX course, we will analyze different writing elements in a variety of genres and discuss why that makes those stories stand out above the rest. By looking at these writing techniques, we will be able to use these ideas to adapt to our own creative writing. We will also think of multiple ways to personalize these writing elements to our unique writing styles by thinking of them from different perspectives and genres.

Each week's video will focus on a specific group of writing elements. The beginning of the class will be reviewing those writing elements, then analyzing famous examples of them in novels and films to find what makes them unique and enticing. After our analysis, we will share ways to apply those techniques to different genres and storylines, as well as brainstorm some potential stories/storylines using those elements. 

We will be using our Classroom as a way to respond to classmates' questions, answer questions in the video, and post requests for examples they want to discuss for the next week. We will monitor our responses to be respectful to other classmates, as well as demonstrate our commitment to learning from the videos. 

Each video will be posted Monday evening (MST) for students to review during the week. All student responses should be posted on our Classroom page up until 24 hours before the next class.