Academic Skills Project - Creative Writing
This page contains details of the Creative Writing ASP workshops run by the School of English. For further information and to register for these workshops, contact the School ASP Coordinator Anna Ball by email at ab583@st-andrews.ac.uk.
Programme details:
Semester 1: Love of the Limelight - Writing Workshops for Theatre, Screen, and Radio.
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Date: Week 2 - Thurs 25/09/2025, Time: 17:00-18:30
Tutor: Valerie Creasy
Location: Watson Room, Kennedy Hall.
Audience: All sub-honours students.
Intended Learning Outcomes:
Although dialogue is important in any script, sometimes a simple glance, an object or a landscape can tell an audience more than words on the page ever could.
This workshop will look at how visual storytelling in cinema is the key to maintaining the right balance of exposition within a script. We will watch samples from films that successfully use this tool, and then we will practice this exercise in class and read the student-written samples aloud.
This workshop will highlight the distinction between playwriting and screenwriting, while exploring how less is often more when it comes to cinema.
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Date: Week 3 - Thurs 2/10/2025, Time: 17:00-18:30
Tutor: Valerie Creasy
Location: Watson Room, Kennedy Hall
Audience: All sub-honours students
Intended Learning Outcomes:
It's true: Anyone can press pause, turn the TV off or even doomscroll as they watch a film, while a performance in a theatre has a captive audience. But how can you be sure no one will walk out? The more captivating the conversations are between your characters, the more likely your audience is to remain in (and at the edge of) their seats.This workshop will investigate the differences between playwriting and screenwriting, with a primary focus on the importance of dialogue in theatre. We will analyze samples from critically acclaimed plays, along with samples students will write in class, by reading them aloud in traditional workshop style.
This class aims to provide students with insight into the various functions of playwriting and to help them hone dialogue as an aspect of craft.
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Date: Week 4 - Thurs 9/10/2025, Time: 17:00-18:30
Tutor: Makayla Hong
Location: Watson Room, Kennedy Hall
Audience: All sub-honours students
Intended Learning Outcomes:
Can action be conveyed without visuals? How does one paint a picture audibly? For radio plays, there are limitless possibilities without the constraints of budget, settings, or special effects.
This session, we will explore audio storytelling through dialogue. We will begin by listening to clips of radio plays to introduce the medium to those unfamiliar with it. There will also be time devoted to an exercise, where each student will be assigned an object to write about in a scene between two characters, with the purpose of channelling visuals verbally.
Before the workshop closes, we will operate as a writer’s room to enact a professional setting. The students will share and discuss each other’s work through table reads, both giving and receiving feedback.
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Date: Week 8 - Thurs 6/11/2025, Time: 17:00-18:30
Tutor: Ezequiel Vigo Fernandez
Location: Watson Room, Kennedy Hall
Audience: All sub-honours students
Intended Learning Outcomes:
When it comes to works of drama, how do we change what the audience believes and use it to our advantage?In this workshop we will be exploring how the writer can manipulate the audience’s perception of the truth. We will experiment with the creation of multiple perspectives within a storyline. Students will come to understand the dramatic potential of managing audience expectations and how misleading them can lead to maintaining and stretching a story’s intrigue.
We will examine existing works of cinema, such as Kurosawa's Rashoman, and Triet's Anatomy of a Fall, that help exemplify this technique in their structure and complete writing exercises to apply this notion in real time.
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Date: Week 9 - Thurs 13/11/2025, Time: 17:00-18:30
Tutor: Ezequiel Vigo Fernandez
Location: Watson Room, Kennedy Hall
Audience: All sub-honours students
Intended Learning Outcomes:
How do multiple storylines benefit the delivery of an over-arching plot in a dramatic work?In this workshop we will take a deep dive into the use of several converging plot lines. We will examine how writers can manage and drive tension from one storyline to the next, what this means for a story’s pacing and how the overlap can create the illusion of a larger world in fiction. We will study previous works of cinema, such as Anderson's Magnolia and Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, that exemplify the use of multiple storylines to discuss how it benefits a certain type of storytelling and when it might be preferable to having a linear plot.
Students will also complete writing exercises to help them understand how this may be applied at a smaller scale and then taken to their own work.
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Date: Week 10 - Thurs 20/11/2025, Time: 17:00-18:30
Tutor: Makayla Hong
Location: Watson Room, Kennedy Hall
Audience: All sub-honours students
Intended Learning Outcomes:
How does one break into a competitive industry? What do entry-level jobs in film look like? Who decides whether or not a movie gets made?
Interns and assistants play an integral role in these decisions. Without them, the industry would not run in its current state. During this session, we will explore the skill of writing script coverage, or analyzing a screenplay to provide feedback for writers, which can be key to unlocking your potential in the writers' room.
We will specifically focus on identifying compelling characters and determining the traits of an active protagonist. The workshop will open with a brief writing session in response to a prompt. Alternatively, students have the option to bring in a pre-existing script. The class will share their work, and each person will provide two notes (one critique, one positive) in a writer’s room setting before moving on to a script analysis exercise to understand what makes a character captivating.