Beginning Storytelling for Writers: The Four Pillars
Four Weeks to Build the Foundation Every Story Needs
With Lyn Liao Butler
October 1, 8, 15, 22, 2025
8 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern (5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Pacific)
Every great story—whether novel, memoir, or screenplay—rests on four essential pillars: character, plot, setting, and theme. In this highly interactive four-week course from Story Summit, you’ll learn how to build each one with clarity, creativity, and purpose. Think of it as the blueprint for your writing journey, saving yourself months (or even years) of trial, error, and rejection by mastering the fundamentals from the start.
This is the first course in our new tiered storytelling program, with intermediate and advanced levels launching in the new year. By beginning here, you’ll be building the solid foundation every successful writer needs.
Class and Workshop Schedule:
Week 1: Character—The Beating Heart of Story
Lecture Topics:
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Crafting characters that readers love, or love to hate
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Goals, motivations, and conflicts, and how they drive the story forward
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Protagonists, antagonists, and important supporting characters
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Crafting unlikeable or unreliable characters that hook readers
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Making each character's voice distinctive in stories with multiple points of view (POVs)
Exercises:
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Create a bio for your main character (name, desire, fear, secret, flaw, backstory).
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Create a timeline for your main characters—when they were born, important milestones, etc.
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Dialogue exercise: Where are your characters from? Do they have accents? What is their unique voice?
Takeaway: A fully developed protagonist, antagonist, and secondary characters, each with clear wants, fears, and obstacles
Week 2: Plot—The Engine That Drives the Story
Lecture Topics:
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What plot really is: cause and effect, sequence of events
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The purposes of plot: creating momentum, providing structure, deepening characters and theme
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Creating the story arc: Beginning, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution
Exercises:
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Outline your current story idea.
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Break down your story into 5–7 turning points.
Takeaway: A one-page outline of your story, focusing on the setup, inciting incident, rising action, midpoint, crisis, climax, and resolution
Week 3: Setting—Creating Worlds That Breathe
Lecture Topics:
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How setting shapes mood, character, and conflict
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Using all five senses to create immersion into the world of your story
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Setting your reader into the scene
Exercises:
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Write a scene in which the setting becomes a character with its own emotional state.
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Describe a place using only one sense (smell, sound, or touch).
Takeaway: Immersing your reader into your setting with sights, sounds, history, and emotional resonance
Week 4: Theme—The Deeper Meaning That Lasts
Lecture Topics:
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Theme: what your story is about vs. what it’s really about
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How to let theme emerge organically through character and plot
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Universal themes, such as Revenge, Coming of Age, Pursuit of Love, Triumph Over Evil
Exercises:
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Write your “One-Sentence Theme” statement.
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Rewrite a scene with your theme in mind.
Takeaway: A 1–2 page synopsis of your story idea showing how the four pillars—character, plot, setting, and theme—work together.
By the end of this course, you will:
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Have characters with depth and authenticity
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Shape a story outline that flows with momentum and purpose
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Create settings that heighten mood and immerse readers
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Identify your story’s deeper theme and write with confidence
This course is your invitation to step into storytelling with clarity, confidence, and creativity—while building the foundation for everything that comes next.
Faculty
Lyn Liao Butler is a Taiwanese American author of thrillers, upmarket fiction, and rom-coms. Her thriller, Someone Else’s Life, was an instant Amazon bestseller, and her second book, Red Thread of Fate, was a finalist in the WFWA Star Awards for 2023. She released the widely acclaimed The Fourth Daughter in August 2025, and her latest thriller, The Deadly Book Club, will launch in October 2025.
Before becoming an author, she was a professional ballet and modern dancer and is still a fitness and yoga instructor. She and her family, including two rescue dogs and a myriad of foster animals, divide their time between New York and Kauai.
Registration fee: $247 for eight hours of instruction
Story Summit Membership subscribers receive this class at no additional cost. Just register and the discount will be applied automatically. Please make sure you're logged in to receive the discount. Not a subscriber yet? Join here.
Please note: Our classes are designed specifically for live participation, so your attendance is important. If you need to miss a class for any reason, you’ll receive a passcode-protected link to watch the recordings after the course is over.
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