Courses

STORY-00Storytelling

How Stories Work

Six decisions survive translation into any medium: the change, the owner, want and obstacle, withholding, scene and summary, and the turn. This is the core of the Storytelling series and it was written last on purpose, after the specialized courses had already put those six terms under pressure in a solo play, a ten-minute drama and a set of public meeting notes. It teaches each decision in depth, shows the same one operating in forms that look nothing alike, and is honest about what does NOT transfer: the things that are genuinely properties of a medium rather than of story. It covers structure as a promise to an audience, why most drafts fail at the change rather than the sentence, the ethics of telling stories about real people, and the discipline of knowing when not to make a story at all. Ends with a diagnostic you can run on any draft in any form.

STORY-TRU1Storytelling

Civic Documentation: Recording What Happened in Public

Public meetings decide budgets, contracts, zoning, policing and schools, and most of them happen in rooms with nobody watching. This course teaches the discipline of documenting them: what a public body actually is, how to read an agenda before you go, how to behave in the room, what open-meetings law protects and what it does not, note-taking to a standard a stranger can use, recording and photography with consent, interviewing after the gavel, and revising notes before memory fades. It covers where documentation ends and reporting begins, why that line protects you, and what defamation and the fair report privilege mean for someone publishing notes. Built on the Documenters Field Guide published by City Bureau, whose program trains and pays people to do exactly this work, with Indianapolis and Mirror Indy as the worked local example. Not affiliated with City Bureau or any local Documenters program. Education about the law, not legal advice.

STORY-TRU2Storytelling

News Storytelling

How do you tell a story when you are not allowed to invent any of it? News sits one rung up the permission ladder from documentation: you may select and arrange, and you may not make things up. This course covers what news is actually for, why the inverted pyramid puts the ending first and what that does to withholding, how to find the owner of a story about a policy, leads that are honest rather than merely arresting, attribution as the load-bearing habit, what you may and may not do to a quotation, numbers and the context that makes them mean something, the difference between a news story and a feature, corrections as a craft rather than an embarrassment, and the specific temptations of narrative journalism. Built on the six decisions from How Stories Work, with the discipline of verification as the thing that separates journalism from everything that looks like it.

STORY-TRU3Storytelling

Documentary

A documentary is a relationship that lasts long enough to change, and that is its central craft problem as much as its central ethical one. This course covers what documentary actually claims about the world, the recognized modes and what each one implicitly promises a viewer, access and the consent that has to be renewed rather than signed once, how structure is found in material rather than scripted in advance, interviewing at depth including the uses of silence, archive as evidence, the ethics of the edit where every honest film shapes and the question is how, the signals that keep reenactment and music honest, and who the film is finally for when the participant, the funder and the audience want different things. Built on the six decisions from How Stories Work, with the field's own account of its dilemmas rather than a list of rules.

STORY-TRU4Storytelling

Oral history

Oral history is the only form in this series whose primary evidence is a person remembering, which makes it the one where being wrong is sometimes the most valuable thing in the recording. This course covers what an oral history is and what it is not, why the word is narrator rather than subject, memory as evidence rather than as unreliable testimony, research before the interview, the life-review interview and the long silences it needs, equipment and metadata that will outlive your laptop, the legal and ethical layer of the deed of gift, transcription and the choices it forces, interviewing family and interviewing about trauma, and what an archive owes a narrator decades later. Built on the six decisions from How Stories Work, using the Oral History Association's published standard rather than a private house style.

STORY-PER1Storytelling

Monodrama I: Writing the Solo Piece

One performer, no scene partner, nowhere to hide. A monodrama is the hardest place to bury a weak story and therefore the best place to learn how stories actually work. This course teaches the six decisions that survive translation into any medium (the change, the owner, want and obstacle, withholding, scene and summary, the turn) by making you apply them to the form that exposes all six at once. It covers what a solo piece can and cannot do, who the audience is to your speaker and why that question decides everything else, how to build place and time with no set, the reliability problem, structural options from the single-sitting confession to the fractured memory piece, how to end, and how to revise. Worked examples are real plays you can read or watch, from Beckett to Anna Deavere Smith to Duncan Macmillan. Ends with a performable draft. Part one of two: performing and staging it is Monodrama II.

$19

STORY-PER2Storytelling

Monodrama II: Performing the Solo Piece

You have a draft. Now you have to stand up. This course takes a solo script onto its feet: direct address as a physical problem rather than a literary one, how one body builds a place with no set, what an audience does to a piece that a room alone never reveals, objectives and actions as tools for finding what a line is DOING, status and the psychological gesture, voice and breath for sixty minutes of speaking, memorisation that survives nerves, how to rehearse alone without going stale or going numb, the technical minimum for lights and sound when you are also the operator, and how to take a piece in front of people and change it afterwards. Includes the safety practice that solo autobiographical work requires and that nobody warns performers about. Part two of two: Monodrama I writes the draft.

STORY-PER3Storytelling

Short-Form Drama: Constraint as a Structural Tool

Ten minutes is not a shortened play. It is a different machine, and the constraint is the teacher. This course covers what actually fits in ten minutes and what never will, how to start a story that is already in motion, the single-situation principle that makes short work possible, why most short pieces fail at the ending rather than the beginning, the one-act as a longer but still single-pressure form, and how short-form video drama inherits the same structure under different delivery. It teaches adaptation between runtimes in both directions, the production realities that decide whether a short play ever gets staged, and how to use the form as a laboratory: a ten-minute piece is the cheapest way to test a structural idea before spending a year on it. Real plays throughout, from Glaspell to Ives to Albee.

STORY-DIS1Storytelling

Digital and social storytelling

Every other form in this series gets an audience that has already agreed to pay attention. This one does not: attention is re-earned every few seconds, by someone holding a phone, sound off, mid-scroll, who did not choose your story and can leave at no cost. This course teaches what that constraint does to structure rather than what any platform currently rewards. The cold open and why the first three seconds are a structural problem and not a trick, the loop, designing for sound-off, the algorithmic middle that stands between a maker and an audience, serialization and the promise a series makes, comments as part of the text rather than a reaction to it, the ethics of a form built for spread including the corrections problem, and what survives a platform's death. Built on the six decisions from How Stories Work, with platform specifics labeled and dated because they are the part that rots.

STORY-99Storytelling

Mockumentary

The capstone of the Storytelling series, and the only course in it that requires the others. A mockumentary is invented work wearing the clothes of work that may not invent, which means you cannot make one well without knowing exactly why documentary conventions persuade. This course reads the True track backwards: what each convention promises, how a fiction borrows it, and where the borrowing becomes a lie. It covers the persuasion grammar of documentary, comedy and satire as separate engines, the character who does not know they are being watched, the frame of an audience that is in on it, the 1938 Welles broadcast and the panic that mostly did not happen, deepfakes and synthetic media as the same problem at industrial scale, and the one line that separates satire from fraud. Ends by asking you to make both a real documentary segment and a false one about the same subject.

Writing Poems and Songs

A poem and a song lyric are built out of the same parts: an image, a line, a rhyme that is doing work rather than filling a slot, a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, and a shape that turns somewhere. The one difference that matters is that a lyric arrives once, in time, at a tempo the listener does not set and under a melody competing for the same attention, while a poem holds still on a page and can be read again. Almost every piece of craft advice that otherwise sounds arbitrary follows from that asymmetry: why a chorus repeats, why a lyric front-loads its concrete detail, why a poem can afford a sentence a lyric cannot, and why a line break does work in the eye that it cannot do in the air. Six sections work through it. The heard-once constraint and what melody buys and charges. Image and the concrete, starting from Ezra Pound's 1913 instruction to go in fear of abstractions. Sound, where perfect rhyme is a tool and not a rule, and slant rhyme, assonance and consonance are the near relatives worth knowing. Stress and meter, and the thing that exists only in song, which is word stress running against a musical beat. The line, the break, the stanza, the turn, and the verse and chorus. And revision, which is mostly cutting. Every example is a poem you can go and read in full, all of them public domain, each quoted from the edition named at the foot of its lesson. No modern song lyric is quoted anywhere here, because song lyrics are under aggressively enforced copyright: where a song is the right example the technique is described and the song is named. This course teaches the writing and nothing else. It has no advice about publishing, placement, licensing, pitching or getting paid, which is a different subject with a different research burden.