The Ultimate Storytelling Workshop

On Saturday 5 July 2025, CCC brought The Ultimate Storytelling Workshop to Guangzhou. One room, one full day, and one teacher pulling story apart to show how the thing actually works.

It was the Guangzhou stop on Peter Walters’ China tour, after Beijing and Shanghai, before Shenzhen. We took the Guangzhou date.

Story you can actually build

Most story advice is vibes. Find your voice, trust the process, let it breathe. Peter Walters does not work like that.

Peter is the writer and teacher behind HowStoriesWork.com, and his whole method treats story as something you can engineer. Deliberate. Almost scientific. He came in with two of his own frameworks and put them to work in the room.

The first is The Essential Story Fractal, his approach to structure. The same shape that holds up a whole film holds up an act, a sequence, a single scene. Learn it once, use it at every scale.

The second is The Periodic Table of Story Elements, a map of the building blocks that make a story grip and land emotionally. Not just a way to read a finished story, but a way to generate ideas on demand. The blank page stops being a wall.

The point underneath both: emotion in an audience is not luck. It is built. Once you can see the parts, you can choose them.

What the room worked through

A full creative toolkit in a single day. Attendees moved through:

• Character, fast. Protagonists and antagonists, temperaments, character dimensions, archetypes. Building people who feel real without weeks of backstory.
• Structure. Three-act and five-act, scenes, sequences, acts, and how they lock together. World building that holds.
• The psychology. Why certain moves land on an audience, and how to aim them on purpose.
• The work that sells. Treatments and dialogue. Concept. Pitching. The pages a producer or a reader actually reacts to.

It ran on dozens of worked examples and handouts, with two Q&A sessions where the room pushed on its own scripts and problems out loud.

Who it was for

Screenwriters and novelists, yes. But also the directors, editors and actors in the room, and anyone who has to stand up and pitch. If your job is to make people feel something on the page or in a meeting, the day was built for you. People left inspired, equipped, and ready to take the next draft up a level, whether that is a script, a novel, or just a sharper instinct for why stories work.

What his students say

Peter taught screenwriting at the Beijing Film Academy, China’s top film school, and several of the people below are BFA grads. Here’s what they took away from the room.

His classes gave me the foundation for how stories work, how to create emotions on the page and sculpt characters that make viewers feel something. That was a total game-changer.

Gianluca Infante, director (Beijing Film Academy)

Peter makes writing feel achievable, less like an abstract ambition and more like a concrete craft. If you’re looking for a course that truly demystifies the writing process, I can’t recommend his classes enough.

Yingqiao Fan, filmmaker

Peter understands the craft of screenwriting on the page like no other and will help you become the best writer you can be. Movie magic made easy.

Thomas Oliver Hand, writer/director

Literally one of the best lecturers I have met personally. Honestly, that was the best lecture I ever attended.

Vladimir Ershov, actor/filmmaker

Not only the best film lecture I’ve attended, but maybe the best lecture of any kind I’ve attended. Peter knows how to keep people’s attention.

Georg Warga, Founder/Creative Director, GOODSTEIN

Peter’s was the first class I ever took on screenwriting. I came in curious. I left with a lifelong passion for the craft.

Gabe Bloch, media executive

Next one

CCC runs workshops like this across the year. To catch the next one before it sells out, follow the CCC WeChat and find us on Instagram, where the day-to-day lives.

Peter’s work and his frameworks live at howstorieswork.com.