Creative Writing Example

Key: | vocabulary | sensory description | literary techniques | engaging opening |

At first, all I could hear was a slow mechanical thud. It matched my heartbeat and felt as if it was
beating directly onto my eardrums. As I opened my eyes, the thud began to sharpen into an acute
ticking noise. Looking up at the clock above my bed, I scowled at it for disrupting my rest.
My eyes followed a peeling plastic wire from the clock to a switch on the opposite side of the
room. I couldn’t make out much else in the gloom but I knew I was somewhere unfamiliar. The air
smelled dry and processed, almost clinical. I struggled to cast my mind back to falling asleep but I
couldn’t remember anything past my morning bike ride.
Just then, the huge door opposite me swung open and in burst a familiar face; my father. His
shaking hand threw on the light switch as he passed it and I was suddenly soaking in blinding
fluorescent light. Grimacing, I looked up at him through squinted eyes. His face was different than
I remembered, far older. The shallow grooves that once graced his brow were now rough, jagged
trenches. Sharp lines of grey cut through his previously auburn hair. My mind swam as I tried to
process this new observation. He knelt down and took my hand reassuringly in his.
I tried to pay attention as he told me about the coma; how the accident wasn’t my fault. My
brain felt overloaded already and so I tried to distract myself with my surroundings. It was during
this time that it started to sink in just how much time had passed. I knew I must be at St Marys
hospital because through the window I could seem the illuminated spires of the local cathedral;
the same spires I used to admire from my bedroom window as a child. I loved their dark, defiant
arms reaching up to the sky. However, the room around me was nothing like the St Mary’s I knew.
On the wall hung strange scarlet circles with a multitude of tangled wires spilling down. Next to
the wires stood an enormous circular glass pod. Across the front of the pod was writing which I
didn’t understand; it was definitely English, but words I’d never seen before.
I was pulled back from my observations by the door banging once again. In strode a tall woman
in her mid-twenties. She looked stressed and her hair was pulled up into a tight bun to keep it out
of her face. Around her feet scurried two toddlers, laughing and giggling much to the tall woman’s
dismay. As she scolded them, two words reached my ears: one familiar and one not, “uncle Sam”.
Sam was my name, but I definitely wasn’t old enough to be an uncle! Besides, I only had one sister
and she was still in diapers. Just then, the tall woman’s eyes met mine. A distinctive flash of hazel
flecked with green. The revelation proved too much for me and I closed my eyes, welcoming back
the slow mechanical thud.