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Our house - descriptive writing! (March 2024)

  Our house has always been a kind of haven for me. It’s a massive two floor villa in the New York suburbs, and we fell in love with it the day we saw it. When you opened the door, you stepped into a little entryway, with a staircase leading up to the second floor. A perfect place to hang family photos. We painted that wall sky blue, and it has stayed unblemished. The photos we always talked about never went up. To the right was a living room. Just two couches, both dark brown, and an emerald-green wallpaper. The curtains facing the street were green gingham, but the true defining feature was the intricate fireplace. It had been unused ever since we’d gotten here, but we’d always imagined the mantle full of trinkets from our travels. Trinkets that had vanished a long time ago. Beyond the living room was a kitchen, which was something else we never used. There was a massive island in the middle with all the space we would have needed for the two of us. There was a dishwasher, an oven, a
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An Essay on the play "An Inspector Calls" by J.B.Priestley (Feb 2024)

An Inspector Calls, a play written in 1945, explores the issues with the pre-World War II Britain’s capitalist ideology. Priestley, the author, promotes a more socialist lifestyle. The play delivers this message through the Birlings – a wealthy capitalist family in 1912 who are attempting to have a celebratory dinner before being interrupted by an inspector who gives the news that a girl – Eva Smith – has died after drinking disinfectant. The play goes on to open a window into each of the Birlings’ privileged lives and how they each play a part in Eva Smith’s suicide. Using each character as an example of capitalism, the play critiques the ideology of the Birlings, using the characters as metaphors for Priestley’s message. The characters in the ‘older generation’ of the play (Mr. Birling, Mrs. Birling, and Gerald Croft) represent capitalism – they are all depicted as selfish, which enforces Priestley’s negative opinions on capitalism. The younger generation, however, (Sheila and Eric B
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Lily & Gray - A Science Fiction (Main Project of the Writing Class - 2023)

  1 lily As usual, it is dark outside. I lie in bed, staring up at my ceiling, and I wonder how  different my life could’ve been. In some other world, I’d be out with friends, or dancing in my refrigerator light while getting a snack. But instead, I’m cowering under my sheets, shit scared that the dome will break when the next bomb hits it. Lily, you’re fine. Lily, you’re fine. I say that, but I’m not. I’m chewing my nails under the cover of darkness. I’m staring at the ceiling and contemplating what could’ve been if the bomb had never hit that park, if I’d never woken up in the hospital, and if I’d just been able to live normally. The morning comes. The ‘sunrise’ is a sham – just millions of bulbs lighting up the inside of the dome. The TV runs the same propaganda – the looped video of a bomb hitting some African country, then a story of how the U.S. stopped its citizens from being brutally murdered. I make myself a coffee (a luxury in today’s times – a large inheritance is the only t
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How art is in everyday life!

Art is everywhere. Art is in everyone. Art is not simply paints or other mediums on canvas, or paper, or anything else. It’s a living, breathing aspect of life. It is an output of creativity – so music, writing, and any other way you express creativity is art. It is all around you in everything. It is just a matter of how you look at the world.  Sometimes, art can be something big. It may be graffiti on the wall on a building on the way to your office, done in spray paints at some point in the night, but is still, at some level, a thing to marvel at. It may be the movie you’re watching – a classic cartoon like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves or Beauty and the Beast, each frame of which are hand drawn by the animators behind each film. These things, in theory, seem completely different – one is on a wall in the middle of a sketchy neighborhood and the other is on your TV screen. But they are both means of creativity expressed through drawing, are they not? Because even though they are
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American Gods - Ayush's version (November 2023)

The day Lyesmith was transferred, Shadow found himself with a very odd item. A copy of Herodotus hollowed and containing a couple of coins. The coins could’ve been useful in a fight if sharpened, but Shadow wasn’t interested in violence – he was just glad he had something to do with his hands. In most cases Shadow was not religious, superstitious, or any of that nonsense. He believed what he could see. But in this case, Shadow could feel an impending sense of danger. Of doom. Paranoia is always useful in a prison – but this? This was extreme. He would often catch himself reading his cellmates and the guards, looking for some clue – any clue – of what was to come. He was not successful. Then, one month before he was set free, he found himself inside a cold office opposite a balding man with a wine-colored birthmark on his forehead. He was holding a chewed-up pen over Shadow’s file, and his voice was nasal and, quite frankly, annoying. “You’re cold.” This was not a question. This was a s
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Lord of the Rings - Ayush's version (November 2023)

The crisp autumn air brought news to Bag End – Bilbo Baggins would soon be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday. The upcoming party became a big conversation point in Bag End – Bilbo Baggins was a very eccentric hobbit, and he was well-known for his disappearance and prompt reappearance sixty years ago. His riches were now nothing more than a piece of lore, and nobody knew just what he had in his house. He was also one of those hobbits that didn’t age – at 99 people started to notice this, but now he was almost eleventy-one, and he looked the same as he did twelve years ago. Needless to say, hobbits were jealous of not only his looks but also his ever increasing wealth. But, like all creatures, his wealth set him aside from the rest of the hobbit crowd, and one of his only true friends was his youngest cousin, and heir to his wealth, Frodo Baggins. They had the same birthday – September 22nd, and celebrated it together most years. Frodo was somewhere in the middle of his ‘reckless t
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The kill

The reflection of the moon on the knife was the only sign of life in the house. The hand that held it, almost black in the shadow of the night, tightly clasped the black bone handle, and the blade was long and slim – so sharp that you would never know that it had hurt you. At least for a while. The silence of midnight wrapped around the house, the only noise being the wailing of the open door in the wind. The man with the knife took a stark white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his blade and then his hand. When he moved to put the handkerchief back in his pocket, it was stained bloodred. The older child, a little girl, was on her bed, surrounded by now bloody cushions. The mother was also lying in bed, her eyes closed and her body still, wrapped in blankets drenched with her blood. The father was on the carpet, his eyes still open and his hands twitching before death truly took him. And there was one more. The younger child, a baby, sleeping silently in his crib. One more, and t
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