event
Creative writing
5 June 2025 - 3 July 2025
Sally Cranswick is a writer, story coach and workshop facilitator with a special interest in memoir and life writing. She encourages writers to incorporate a daily habit of writing and to have fun with their creativity. Her collection of short stories, Women out of Water (Modjaji Books), was shortlisted for the SALA Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award in 2022. She has written many short stories, features and columns for various magazines and newspapers – most recently the Sunday Times – and has an MA cum laude in Creative Writing from UCT and a BA with honours in Creative & Media Writing from Middlesex University, London. She is university registered for A PHD at the University of Western Cape. Before settling in Cape Town, Sally was a singer and lived in many countries around the world.
Physical Address:
Centre for Extra Mural Studies
Level 3, Kramer Law Building, UCT
Rondebosch, 7701
Phone: 021 650 2634
Fax: 021 650 2893
Email: ems@uct.ac.za
Office Hours
Monday to Friday 09:00 - 16:30
CREATIVE WRITING
Facilitator: Sally Cranswick
Dates: Thursday 5 June–Thursday 3 July
Time: 6pm
Course fee: R2 200, staff and students R1 100. Upon registration the link will be provided
Everyone is welcome | Most suited to memoir and family stories
Platform: Zoom
Maximum: 20 participants
Booking is through Webtickets: Creating Writing with Sally Cranswick
Need to Write That Story!
Do you go for a walk and ‘that story’ starts playing in your head again? Do you add things to it and realise there’s more to it than you had originally thought, and then the story starts to get noisier and noisier? You have a story to tell!
Join me on this five-week course where we will take the central nugget of your story, decide what sort of story it is – a full novel, creative non-fiction piece, memoir essay or flash. We’ll think about theme, narration, point of view and style – and we will also look at ways to structure. Each week’s workshop will feature a combination of content presentation combined with practical writing exercises and writing time.
This course is suited to all writers. Our aim is to have fun and work together as a creative community to achieve our highest writing goals. Expect lots of writing, lots of interaction and lots of practical application.
Week 1: What are you writing?
We’ll discuss the different genres plus memoir vs biography vs autobiography vs memoir essay vs creative non-fiction piece… and everything in between.
Week 2: What’s your theme?
We’ll discuss popular themes, your themes, how many themes you can use, and why theme is so vital to your story.
Week 3: Who’s telling your story?
Are you the narrator or would you prefer a third party tell your story? We’ll look at how you can use different points of view, how that shifts the reader’s perception and we will think about the use of ‘I’ in memoir and first per-son narration.
Week 4: What structure will you use?
We’ll discuss how to structure your story towards a climax, plus the merits of parts, chapters, prologues, epilogues and everything in between.
Week 5: Putting it all together
In our final week we will develop a synopsis for your story and an opening paragraph…