Creative Writing: Find your voice

Join a six-week online introduction to creative writing, combining sessions delivered by experienced lecturers from Edge Hill University’s Creative Writing programme and two masterclasses with award-winning writers.

Course outline

These workshops offer a unique opportunity to gain insight into creative processes, learn from established practitioners and develop your own writing through practical guidance and inspiration. Across six weeks, you will be introduced to a wide range of writing forms, developing your understanding of the distinctive techniques and possibilities of each form.

The course will introduce you to:

• Becoming a Writer – Writerly habits, freewriting, exercises and workshops
• Flash Fiction – Discover how powerful stories can be created in a very small space, exploring the importance of language, structure and detail.
• Exploring Short Fiction – Explore the foundations of fiction writing, including character, setting, narrative and structure.
• Script Writing – Discover the fundamentals of writing for performance and explore how dialogue, action and structure work together.
• Screenwriting – Explore the distinctive techniques and conventions of writing for the screen, from visual storytelling to scene construction.
• Poetry – Experiment with language, imagery, rhythm and form while exploring different approaches to writing poetry.

You will be given the opportunity to experiment with your own writing, explore different approaches to the craft and discover what suits your creative interests.

Whether you are completely new to creative writing or already have some experience and want to explore new forms, this online course offers a supportive and inspiring environment in which to develop your skills, experiment with your writing and discover new creative possibilities.

Edge Hill University tutor profiles

Dr Zayneb Allak

Dr Zayneb Allak is a writer and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Associate Director of the Institute of Creative Enterprise. With a focus on contemporary literature and psychoanalytic literary criticism, her research examines the poetics of writing and reading. She has published original poetry and creative/critical prose. She is currently completing a creative/critical book that considers ways in which writing ‘spiders’ into being, as well as developing an interdisciplinary project that responds to Jacques Derrida’s thinking on hospitality as ‘a question of the other’.

Sarah Schofield

Sarah Schofield’s stories have been published in Best British Short Stories 2020 (Salt) Lemistry, Bio-Punk, Thought X, Beta Life, Spindles and Conradology (all Comma Press) Spilling Ink Flash Fiction Anthology, Litfest’s The Language of Footprints, Synaesthesia Magazine, Lakeview International Journal, Woman’s Weekly, Hinterland magazine for creative nonfiction and others. She has been shortlisted on the Bridport and the Guardian Travel Writing Competition and won the Orange New Voices Prize, Writer’s Inc and The

Calderdale Fiction Prize. An excerpt from her story ‘The Bactogarden’ featured on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book. Her debut short story collection, Safely Gathered In was published in November 2021 and she is currently working on her second collection.

Dr Kim Wiltshire

Dr Kim Wiltshire is a scriptwriter and fiction writer. Plays include: Polarised (2004 – Burnley Youth Theatre), about the 2001 race riots; The Loser (2009) for Scenepool at Camden People’s Theatre; Sing When You’re Winning (2010) for Bolton Octagon; Joy With Child (2010) for Organised Chaos in Manchester (shortlisted for the 2009 Bruntwood Prize); Triple The Price Of Fruitcake as part of the Come Closer event at the Royal Exchange (2015). In 2014, supported by Bolton Octagon and Arts Council England, she toured Project XXX and in Autumn 2017 The Value of Nothing, directed by Joyce Branagh – both plays published by Aurora Metro. She has authored Writing For Theatre: Creative and Critical Approaches (Palgrave Macmillan) and she co-edited and co-wrote, with Billy Cowan, Scenes from the Revolution (Pluto Books) about fifty years of political theatre. She also has a range of short fiction published in journals such as Funny Pearls, The Amphibian and in Cultureword’s collection Migration Stories.

Masterclass profiles

Dr Carys Bray

Dr Carys Bray is the author of a short story collection and three novels. Her work has been shortlisted for the Costa Book Award (First Novel) and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and she won the 2015 Author’s Club Best First Novel Award. Her short fiction has been broadcast on Radio Four and her novel A Song for Issy Bradley was a Book at Bedtime. Her most recent novel, When the Lights Go Out was a Times Best Paperback of 2021. Carys has worked with writers in the community and as a Creative Writing lecturer on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. She was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Lee Thompson

Lee Thompson is a working-class writer from Liverpool whose work spans television, theatre, audio drama and podcasting. His screenwriting credits include writing an episode of

the BBC’s long-running drama series Waterloo Road (Series 20), alongside several television projects currently in development.

Lee contributed to the revival of Play for Today, writing the episode Special Measures for LA Productions and Channel 5. He has also written for Moving On (BBC/LA Productions), the acclaimed anthology drama created by Jimmy McGovern. Lee was awarded a special commendation in the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award for Radio Drama in 2023.

Session outline

• Week 1: An Introduction to Creative Writing: Discover what it means to become a writer, using writerly exercises and techniques that you will build on in the coming weeks, and exploring how we can workshop and share ideas, whilst still bringing our own unique creativity to our work.
• Week 2: An Introduction to Flash Fiction: Discover the art of writing compelling fiction in miniature. Explore how writers use language, structure, character and detail to create powerful stories within a limited word count, and experiment with the possibilities of flash fiction.
• Week 3: An Introduction to Short Fiction: Explore the foundations of short story writing, considering how character, setting, narrative voice and structure work together to create an engaging story. This session will introduce techniques to help you develop and shape your own short fiction.
• Week 4: An Introduction to Script Writing: Discover the fundamentals of writing for performance. Explore how dialogue, action, character and structure can be used to bring a story to life on the page and consider the relationship between writing and performance.
• Week 5: An Introduction to Screenwriting: Explore the distinctive craft of writing for the screen. Consider how visual storytelling, scene construction, dialogue and structure work together to create compelling screen narratives.
• Week 6: An Introduction to Poetry: Experiment with the possibilities of poetic writing. Explore language, imagery, rhythm, sound and form while considering how poets create meaning and develop their own distinctive voices.

 Course information

Please note that all of our community CPD courses are aimed at adults and you must be over 18 to join. This course can only be purchased directly from the store if you are accessing it from the United Kingdom. If you are accessing it from outside the United Kingdom, please email [email protected] to enquire further.