Craft Narratives That Move People
Storytellers across contexts — fiction, brand, journalism, documentary, data communication, and pitching. You tell stories in brand campaigns and boardroom presentations, in novels and documentaries, in pitches and investigative reports, in data briefings and coaching conversations, and you regularly need narratives that move people: from doubt to belief, from passive reception to action, from professional distance to genuine recognition of what's at stake. You are not starting from scratch — you have storytelling instincts and can recognise when something works, but you cannot always reproduce that quality on demand. You may have tried AI for story development and found it helpful-but-generic: plausible-sounding narratives that feel like someone else's, or useful for logistics but not for soul. This course is for you if you are ready to develop a principled understanding of why stories move people, and to use that understanding with AI to produce narratives that are unmistakably and consistently yours. No technical background is required.
Explain why stories move people — the narrative transportation and neural-coupling mechanisms behind engagement, memory, and action — so you can evaluate and strengthen any narrative rather than guess at what worked.
Diagnose why a story fails to land using the MOVE Framework — Moment, Obstacle, Vulnerability, Effect — and rebuild the weakest element instead of rewriting the whole thing.
Find the story in raw material — data, research, events, interviews, or lived experience — with the three story-finding questions, and carry it through from theme to a concrete moment.
Build characters your audience identifies with using the four dimensions of character depth, and set stakes at the personal, relational, and wider levels so the outcome matters.
Construct a narrative arc that holds tension, correct the three structural breaks — the false start, the sagging middle, the unearned resolution — and land an ending that is both surprising and inevitable.
Adapt your technique across five contexts — fiction, brand narrative, pitch, journalism and documentary, and data storytelling — and recognise the failure modes that appear when a technique is borrowed without understanding why it works.
Use AI as a narrative thinking partner with the PRISM Prompting Framework, verify what it gives you with TRUST, apply the GUARD safety check before you paste anything sensitive, and protect the voice that makes the story yours.
Leave with a personal 30-Day Storytelling Plan built around your own contexts, so the craft becomes a practice rather than a one-off result.
Module by module, in the order they are assigned.
This opening section explains why accurate stories can still fail, and why AI belongs as a support tool rather than the source of meaning. You learn to separate reports from stories, diagnose flat narratives with Moment, Obstacle, Vulnerability, and Effect, and keep human judgment in charge.
MOVE turns story instinct into a practical diagnostic for pitches, case studies, reports, scenes, and any narrative that feels accurate but fails to land. You use Moment, Obstacle, Vulnerability, and Effect to find structural weaknesses, rebuild flat material, and work with AI without surrendering judgment.
Raw material becomes story only when a specific person, obstacle, and human consequence come into view, which matters when reports, datasets, interviews, and cases feel important but inert. By the end, you can find the narrative thread, develop the central character, and make the stakes concrete.
Structure turns true material into an audience experience by shaping arc, pressure, and release across different storytelling contexts. You learn to diagnose false starts, sagging middles, and unearned resolutions, then use AI to stress-test choices while keeping meaning under human judgment.
Storytelling changes when fiction, brand, pitch, journalism, and data each impose different licences and obligations. You adapt MOVE by context, diagnose borrowed-technique failures, and brief AI with the permits, demands, and forbids that keep each story fit for purpose.
AI becomes a narrative partner only when judgment, verification, and voice stay with the storyteller, so this final practice connects prompting, safety, authenticity, and habit. By the end, you use PRISM, TRUST, GUARD, and a 30-Day Storytelling Plan to develop defensible AI-assisted stories.
The course closes with a timed final exam with a pass mark and a limited number of attempts. A pass issues a PDF certificate with its own serial, in the name of the Straits Institute for Applied AI. Cohort progress, at-risk learners and a CSV export are in the admin console throughout.
No. No technical background is assumed and there is no AI prerequisite — the course teaches the prompting it relies on. If you are new to AI, AI+ for Everyone (T1-01) is a useful companion; if you want craft mechanics such as drafting and editing, AI+ Creative Writing (T3-08) pairs well. You need to be comfortable writing and comfortable with everyday tools.
No — it is built for storytellers across contexts by design. Module 5 works the same premise through five of them: fiction, brand narrative, pitch and persuasion, journalism and documentary, and data storytelling. Novelists, brand strategists, executives who pitch, journalists, documentary makers, coaches, educators, content creators, and analysts presenting findings all sit inside the intended audience.
No. The operating stance is that AI is a tool to help you, not replace you — not the storyteller, but the most rigorous, tireless, uninvested reader you have ever had access to. You develop the concept, choose the moment, test the structural logic, deepen the character, and keep the final decision on voice and authenticity. AI interrogates the story; it does not generate it for you.
Those models are treated as lenses for diagnosis, not templates to fill in. The course is built on principles you can apply, test, and develop — with the MOVE Framework working as both a diagnostic (what is missing in a narrative that does not land) and a construction guide (how to build one that does). It is designed for readers who found the existing books either too prescriptive or too genre-specific.
Module 6 takes this on directly. You learn to tell when AI is helping and when it is flattening or genericising the work, to protect your storytelling voice, and to answer the authenticity question by context — what a journalist owes a reader is not what a novelist owes one. You apply the GUARD check (Gauge, Understand, Authority, Risk, Decide) to your own contexts and arrive at a disclosure position you can defend.
Six 60-minute modules, each with practice you run in an AI chat as you go. It opens with a five-question diagnostic that routes you to where you need the most work, and closes by building a personal 30-Day Storytelling Plan — so you can apply the craft to a real story straight away.
Create Learning Experiences That Work
Lead Transitions That Actually Stick
Prepare Smarter, Win More, Leave Less on the Table
Open Doors and Build Pipelines with AI
Retain and Grow Your Clients with AI Insight
Course libraries are assigned per user, team or department, and the reporting comes back to whoever has to answer for the programme. Tell us who needs it and we will show you the console.
