short essay on the day i woke up late

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Outstanding Story - The day I was late for my examination

“The day I was late for my examination” is one of the outstanding stories of the second biannual Short Story Contest 2016 written by Pachipala Aishwarya, Singapore.

The day I was late for my examination

It was a breezy Monday morning. It was a comfortable morning for a sleep.

“Ring!” My alarm clock rang but I ignored it. After a while, unknowingly, I drifted into Dreamland.

When I woke up, I stared at the alarm clock and could not believe my eyes. “I’m late for my examination!” I wailed frantically. I jumped out of bed, brushed my teeth, changed into uniform and tore out of the house.

I ran as fast as my legs could carry me. On the way to school, I realised that yesterday I was revising for my examination till late night. I reached school as soon as possible and raced up the stairs to my classroom ‘Primary 3 Confidence’. I stopped outside of the classroom. It was so quiet that I could hear a pin drop. I was contemplating whether to go in or not. My heart started thumping fiercely against my chest and my legs started wobbling like jelly.

I wanted to see who the invigilator was so I took a peek. It was my Science teacher, Mr Tan. From the corner of his eye, he spotted me. My skin felt cold and clammy when he walked towards me. There was no way to escape. Beads of perspiration trickled down my forehead.

With his arms crossed, he glared at me angrily and pulled me aside so as not to disturb the other pupils. “Please give me another chance,” I pleaded nervously. As I talked, I felt very guilty and embarrassed as everyone’s eyes fell on me.

He muttered furiously under his breath, “I can allow you to sit for the examination but you won’t have sufficient time to complete the paper.”

I heaved a sigh of relief. Mr Tan passed me the paper and I started doing it. Luckily, I had revised for the examination so all the questions were easy for me to complete and I handed-in on time. I was much relieved because I could finish the paper on time.

When I got home after school, I told my mother about the incident. After this unforgettable lesson, I would never forget to revise early for my examinations again. My mother reprimanded me harshly that day. I tried to be early or on time from that day onwards.

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Essay on Being Late to School: Hurry Up with New Ideas 2024

You push the snooze button once again and finally open your eyes. It is already 8:50, and your classes start at 9. “I’m going to be late again!”— you think, already in full panic mode. In a minute, you rush out the door half-dressed, swallowing your sandwich on the go. 

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Does this happen to you every morning? Then, writing an essay on being late to class will be a beneficial task for you.

In the article, you’ll see how to approach writing a “being late” essay. Our custom-writing team has collected the most useful tips that will help you nail the task. Additionally, you will find here:

• topics to write about;
• examples of writing different types of essays on being late to class. 

☑️ How to Write Essays about Tardiness

• 📜 Essays on Being Late: Different Types
• 💡 Top Essay Ideas
• 🔎 References

In case you have to write an essay on being late in general, regardless of the situation, the following tips are for you. Learn how to compose a successful 500-words essay on the topic:   

Step #1: Start with describing a situation when being on time is extremely important.

Let the situation be a job interview, for instance. Tell about the consequences of being late in that case. Can a person who is late for a job interview actually get a job?

Step #2: Now, you can discuss reasons for tardiness.

So, why do some people tend to be late regularly? What excuses do they usually have? Are there any scientific explanations of this phenomenon? Give answers in your essay.

Step #3: Finally, you can discuss how to manage this problem.

Introduce some basic principles of time management. Don’t forget to add your recommendations. If you’ve already had a similar issue, describe how you handled it.

If you have to write an essay about your tardiness, here’s how to apologize for being late:

📜  Different Types of Essays on Being Late: How to Write

Did you know that there are several types of essays on being late? And each type requires different structure. Sounds overwhelming, right? 

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Worry not: we have an explanation for every type of essay. With our advice, you can nail your paper on coming late to school!

Apology Letter for Being Late

You write an apology letter when you need to report why you were late. It’s a short, formal essay addressed to your teacher or professor. It can seem daunting at first, but it’s relatively easy to write.

• Start with your teacher’s or principal’s name. You can add “dear” if you want. Example: Dear Mrs [your teacher’s name]
• Apologize for your lateness. Be sincere and straightforward. Example: I am very sorry I missed the first part of your class today.
• Explain why you were late. Don’t make up excuses! Describe the situation as it happened. Example: I was late because I got caught up in a traffic jam.
• Say that you understand that you were wrong. Promise that you won’t be late again. Example: I understand that I should have gotten up earlier. I’ll do my best not to let this happen again.
• Ask what you can do to catch up with the material you’ve missed. Example: I will do the classwork I’ve missed. Please allow me to write the exam I’ve missed.
• Sign the letter with your name and a complimentary close. Example: Thank you for your consideration. Sincerely, [your name]

Cause and Effect Essays for Being Late

Papers on lateness are great for exploring causes and effects. In your essay, you can focus on the reasons behind tardiness and the consequences of being late.

• Select a problem that you can work with. Example: Being late for school causes a lot of stress for a student .
• State the leading cause of the problem. Example: Lateness is often caused by a lack of sleep due to stress or too much work.
• Think about the possible effects of this problem. Example: Tardiness can lead to more stress-related problems.
• Write a conclusion. You can simply sum up what you described in the essay. Example: As you can see, being late often causes additional stress.

Narrative Essay for Being Late

Writing a narrative essay is almost like telling a story. In this case, you’ll compose a short story about your absence or tardiness. Here are some tips:

• Write a clear introduction. For example, describe the day when you were late for school. Example: One day I was late for a science lesson and missed a very exciting experiment.
• Write from the first-person perspective. This is instrumental if you’re describing something that happened to you personally. Example: I want to write about an experience that taught me a lot.
• Tell the whole story! Start by describing the reasons why you were late and finish with the outcomes and the lessons learned. Example: In the end, I understood that I should manage my time better.

Reflective Essay for Being Late

A reflective paper is a lot like a narrative essay, but it’s more formal. Here you can reflect on your understanding of punctuality and talk about what influenced it.

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• Start by formulating the main idea or a thesis. Example: Understanding how my actions affected other people helped me to become more punctual.
• Describe what you’ve learned through experience and how it influenced you. Example: This experience showed me that if you’re tardy, you can miss the most important events in your life.
• Don’t be afraid to show some creativity and use descriptive language in your reflective essay. Example: The realization hit me like lightning.

Argumentative Essay for Being Late

When writing about being late, you will need to convince the reader of your viewpoint by using arguments.

For example, you can choose to write about how lateness can affect academic performance:

• Formulate your topic as a question. The answer will become your thesis statement. Example: Topic: How can tardiness affect academic performance? Thesis: Students that come late to school disrupt the discipline and miss out on important information, leading to poor academic performance.
• Introduce two arguments—one for and one against your statement. Example: Tardiness negatively affects students’ academic performance, although some people think it’s an exaggeration.
• Present arguments that will persuade the reader that your point is correct and that the opposite is wrong. Example: Students who come to school late miss the first part of the discussion, which makes it hard for them to understand the lesson.

💡  Essays on Being Late: Top Ideas

In some cases, you’re allowed to select what to discuss in your paper. There are several angles to consider the topic from, and you may have trouble picking one.

Can’t decide what to write about in your essay on being late to class? Here are some ideas you can choose from with examples.

Reasons for Being Late to Class

You probably think that laziness and poor time management are the main reasons why students don’t arrive in time. For your essay on being late to school, you might also want to consider the following ideas:

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• Some live too far away, and it’s difficult for them to arrive on time.
• Some have illnesses or disabilities that cause them to be late.
• Sometimes students experience too much stress and have trouble sleeping.
• Learners who are bullied at school may refuse to go back there.
• Issues with public transport may result in delays.
• Some are afraid of their teachers, or they don’t want to write tests.
• Some students want to challenge authority by breaking the rules.
• Some might have problematic parents who try to keep them at home.
• Working because of the family’s tough financial situation forces students to skip classes.
• Practicing religious rites may result in lateness to school.
• Kids can come late on purpose to show off.
• Conflicts with teachers make learners avoid attending classes.
• Caring for younger siblings may cause lateness.
• Another reason to consider for your essay is the desire to get an adrenaline rush.
• A car breaking down or a bike’s flat tire can cause learners to be unpunctual.
• Some students are not motivated to study.
• Living in a troubled neighborhood can prevent punctuality.
• Kids may fall asleep in public transport and pass their stop.
• If a child is inattentive in the morning, they may forget to get out of the house in time.
• Caring for pets before school can be a reason for students to be late.
• Some are exhausted and sleep through their alarms.
• If something around the house needs repair, students may fail to arrive at school on time.
• Going to bed late at night makes it difficult to get up in the morning.
• Forgetting their belongings at home may cause students to go back to collect them.
• An essay on being late to school might want to look at mental health problems as a cause for lateness.
• Some might be negatively influenced by their peers.
• Many students spend too much time getting ready in the morning.
• Noisy neighbors can cause sleep problems or even make one miss one’s alarm.
• Family problems often affect children’s capability to be organized and punctual.
• Many school kids like buying coffee before class and spend a lot of time in queues.
• Students might skip a class because they haven’t done their homework.
• For some people, it’s tough to keep track of time.
• Absence can be a result of caring for elders.
• Some may spend too much time preparing breakfast .
• Some students’ parents distract them instead of helping to get ready for school.

You can discuss one of these reasons in your essay about tardiness and propose what can be done:

Students who live too far away should inform their teachers beforehand that they can be late.

Lateness and Academic Performance

Alternatively, you can focus on the impacts of tardiness on studying. Explain the effects of poor attendance in an essay: write about one of the following points.

• During the first hours in the morning, students are the most attentive.
• The first few minutes of class often cover essential information.
• If you are often late, your tardiness can become chronic, which can affect your academic performance .
• Tardiness causes behavioral problems and can lead to suspension.
• Lateness makes you distracted and less attentive.
• A significant disadvantage of being late is possible conflicts with teachers .
• Students who are late have problems with keeping accurate records.
• The ability to follow the instructions is reduced in tardy learners.
• Students that often arrive late can miss out on important tests or exams.
• Lateness increases academic stress .
• Being tardy increases the school workload at home.
• One pupil’s lateness can disrupt the whole class.
• Tardiness negatively affects one’s reputation .
• Lateness usually makes learners feel disconnected from school.
• Tardiness can result in dropouts.
• Teachers often decide to keep late students out of class.

• Learners who are always late might have a harder time getting teachers’ help and support.
• At worst, chronic tardiness can delay the graduation of affected students.
• The stress that comes with being late to class can impact learners’ concentration .
• Teachers may want to check late students’ homework more thoroughly.
• Tardy pupils may be assigned extra tasks or tests.
• Tardy students may have to report to the principal .
• An instructor is less likely to grant you automatic A or other favors if you’re chronically late.
• Tardiness can start a snowball effect with many unintended adverse consequences.
• In a lesson with group projects , late teenagers disappoint their classmates.
• Chronic lateness in middle school may lead to problems in high school.
• Late students may not be admitted to exams .
• Tardy students might find it challenging to keep up with the education process.
• Tardiness decreases motivation to study .
• Some teachers punish late students by deliberately lowering their grades.
• Pupils who are not punctual are unlikely to get school awards and prizes.
• Continually tardy learners are likely to be detained after school.
• Parents might want to punish their chronically late children by making them to do additional work.
• Classmates will consider their tardy peers last when they need to select partners for group projects.

You can also discuss how tardy students affect the activity of the whole class:

Students who are late for school cause teachers to interrupt their lessons. They take other students’ attention away from the teacher and can sometimes disrupt discipline in class.

Reasons for Being Punctual

Naturally, every student needs to learn how to manage time properly . So, why not write an essay about the importance of being punctual? Here are some topic examples:

• Punctuality makes you more disciplined .
• Punctuality means not only getting to school on time but also never missing your deadlines.
• Punctual students perform better in academics .
• Punctuality makes your thoughts more precise and your mind more stable.
• Punctual students won’t get in trouble or detention due to lateness.
• Punctuality characterizes a confident person who is realistic about how long their actions take.
• If you’re always on time, you rarely miss crucial information and can learn more skills .
• Another reason why not being late is beneficial is that you can perform more tasks during the day.
• By being punctual, one shows respect for other people and oneself.
• People have more confidence in those who are always on time.
• It isn’t easy to follow one’s schedule without being punctual.
• You don’t need to apologize if you’re not late.
• Punctuality saves time and reduces stress .
• A punctual person does not have to cancel plans because of their lateness.
• For a punctual person, it’s easier to multitask .
• You are less likely to have problems with teachers or classmates.
• Punctuality is a valuable skill in all spheres of life.
• Punctuality leaves you more time to enjoy your hobbies and relax.
• Punctual students are considered reliable.
• An argumentative paper could demonstrate that there are simply no disadvantages to always being on time.
• Punctual kids don’t force teachers to interrupt lessons and have fewer conflicts with them.
• Punctual students are more organized.
• Timeliness helps students to build confidence .
• Punctuality goes hand in hand with professionalism and attention to detail.
• It’s less awkward to wait for someone than have someone else wait for you.
• Precise scheduling teaches learners how to manage time and prioritize things .
• You don’t come off as disrespectful or arrogant.
• A punctual person has their life under control.
• Punctual students worry less about making mistakes .
• Others don’t make fun of people who avoid being late.
• Punctual people are usually treated with respect.
• Punctuality helps learners build their integrity .
• Always being on time makes you more likable.
• You’re comfortable with having some downtime if you’re punctual.
• Students’ punctuality increases their self-control .

You can also try and find other reasons why being punctual is better than being tardy.

If you’re punctual, you have better relations with teachers, and you’re considered reliable.

How to Stop Being Late to School

Still haven’t found a good topic for your essay on being late to class? Try writing about how to avoid lateness!

• Calculate the best time for you to wake up, get ready, and leave the house.
• Keep track of how much time you spend on your morning routine.
• Learn to respect your teachers and fellow students.
• Think of how to reduce stress.
• Try going to bed and waking up earlier.
• Don’t be afraid to discuss your tardiness problem with teachers.
• Leave the house as early as possible.
• Set several alarms without a snooze option.
• Think of the best way to get to school beforehand.
• Invite your friends to meet somewhere and go to school together.
• Make your alarm melody louder and more energetic.
• Start to follow the same sleep schedule every day.
• Prepare everything in the evening so that you don’t have to do it before school.
• Set alarms to know when it is time to go out, eat, or do homework .
• Spend more time outside to reduce stress.
• Set your watch and clocks five or ten minutes ahead.
• Exercise more . Morning jogging is especially helpful for developing punctuality.
• Do your homework as early as possible.
• Organize your working space and make it comfortable.
• Plan your activities so that you can go to bed earlier.
• Spend less time on social networks or playing computer games .
• Remember that being late is disrespectful.
• Ask your parents to help you prepare for school quicker.
• Learn the schedule of the public transport you use.
• Avoid getting distracted on your way to school.
• Respect your own time and find ways to stay motivated.
• Remember that arriving too late often means missing out on important information.
• Don’t fall asleep on public transport on your way to school.
• Reward yourself when you arrive on time.
• If you live far from your school, find a friend who has a car and could drive you.
• Have a nutritious breakfast that can be quickly prepared.
• Check your backpack before going out to make sure you didn’t forget anything.
• Ask your parents or siblings to wake you up if you sleep through the alarm.
• Try being punctual without rushing.
• Ask your parents to avoid distracting you in the morning.
• Don’t use your smartphone while having breakfast or getting ready to leave.

You can come up with your own tips as well!

Try to keep your things organized so that you can get ready more quickly.

Excuses for Being Late

You know how excuses for being late to school can sometimes be funny and make teachers question if you’re telling the truth. Yet, there are many valid reasons for a delay, which are helpful to know. Discussing why students failed to come on time may be interesting for an essay on being late to school. For example:

• Illness verified by a parent.
• Medical appointments.
• Problems in the family .
• Extreme weather conditions.
• Participation in community events.

There are many legitimate reasons for a student’s absence. Here’s how you can write about them in your essay:

Example: Students with ADHD are usually not punished when they’re late, but they’re encouraged to be more punctual next time.

Now you know everything you need to write a perfect paper! There is one more piece of advice we want to give you. Don’t forget about the deadline for submitting your essay on being late.

And thanks for reading the article! Send it to your peers who might find it useful.

🤔  Essays on Being Late FAQ

Students are often latecomers. Coming to class on time may seem unimportant. There is usually no serious punishment, which is one of the reasons why some students are always late.

The disadvantages are numerous. A latecomer attracts the unwanted attention of the audience and provokes negative reactions. Those who are late do not make a good impression. Coming late is bad in most aspects except for a few advantages like sleeping more.

An occasional late arrival doesn’t necessarily say anything about your personality. Everyone might have some bad days when things just don’t work out well. But always coming late (or often enough) says that you are irresponsible and have poor time-management skills.

Sometimes, students are asked to write an essay after they are late to class. The topic of that essay is simple: being late. It is a means of discipline to help students understand how bad it is to arrive late.

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🔎  References

• Solve a Teaching Problem: Students Come to Class Late: Carnegie Mellon University
• 5 Ways to Stop Being Late to All of Your Classes: Study.com
• The Impact of Tardiness on School Success: Hailey Elementary
• The Role of Personality and Agencies of Socialization in Tardiness, Absenteeism and Academic Performance: Researchgate
• Cause and Effect Essays: EAP Foundation
• Narrative Essays: Purdue University
• Reflective Writing: Plymouth University
• 4 Habits of Punctual People: Fast Company
• This Is Why You’re Always on Time: Huffpost
• Student Truancy and Lateness: OECD iLibrary
• 9 Extremely Good Reasons You Should Never Be Late Again: Inc.com
• Best and Worst Excuses for Being Late to Work: The Balance Careers
• The Advantages of Being on Time vs. Being Late to School: Seattle PI
• Never Be Late Again: 15 Tips to Guarantee You’ll Always Be on Time: Entrepreneur
• How to Deal with a Teen Who Is Late for School Every Morning: Very Well Family
• Reducing Late Arrivals: Duquesne University
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Why You Can’t Stop Waking Up Late & How That’s Affecting Your Brain

Especially if you were up late panicking about your big work project (or herding sheep on Minecraft), you might be tempted to sleep in the next day. It's an understandable instinct, but in the long run, that might not be what's best for your mind — even though it feels good to stay burrowed in your blankets. As far as your sleep schedule goes, waking up an hour later than usual can have a negative impact on your brain, as well as your overall health.

"Research shows that the timing of sleep may be just as important as how many hours we sleep," says Rose MacDowell , a sleep expert and chief research officer at mattress-reviewer Sleepopolis. While you might quickly forget your wide-eyed panic when you slept past your alarm, your brain will remember getting an extra hour of sleep . That might be a good thing if you're super tired, but it can wreak havoc on your attempts to form a consistent schedule. In other words, hitting snooze on Monday might make you a lot more likely to throw your alarm against the wall on Tuesday (and Wednesday, etc.).

Why You Waking Up Later

"Sleeping late can lower the sleep drive and make falling asleep the next night more difficult," MacDowell tells Bustle. When it comes time to wind down and get ready for bed, you'll find that you have more energy than usual, and you'll likely end up staying awake later as a result. This can throw off the next night and the next, and it can be tough to reset your brain and get back on track .

"Sleeping an extra hour can also lower sleep efficiency, which can cause similar effects to sleep deprivation ," MacDowell says. " Sleep efficiency is the percentage of time spent asleep while in bed. Sleep is considered efficient when at least 85% of time in bed is spent asleep, and inefficient when less than 85% is spent asleep. Sleeping late can reduce sleep efficiency because time in bed increases and the circadian rhythm is disrupted [...] Numerous studies show that consistent sleeping and waking schedules are important for keeping the circadian rhythm regulated." One such study, published in the journal Scientific Reports in 2017, found that the more consistent your sleeping patterns are, the better your academic performance will be. The more you sleep in, the less efficient your sleep might become — which is bad news for the next early-morning study session you wanted to get in.

What Happens To Your Brain When You Wake Up Later

Sleeping later than usual doesn't just force you to rush to work — it also messes with your ability to stay focused on those spreadsheets. "If your sleep was interrupted several times during the night, for example, your brain may not be as sharp as usual, with a decrease in cognitive ability and in attention span," says Dr. Steven Reisman , M.D., who is board-certified in internal medicine. "It may adversely affect memory," which is why you might feel groggy and out of it, or possibly make silly mistakes in school or at work the next day."

While waking up late on occasion probably won't have a major impact on your brain, ongoing disrupted sleep can cause problems over time. "There may be a buildup of amyloid protein in the brain, which has been linked to Alzheimer’s disease," Reisman says. So even though it may be tempting to go to bed and wake up at different times each day, it's best to stick to a schedule as often as possible.

How To Establish A Better Sleep Routine

"It is advisable to wake up the same time each day because if one gets into a regular routine with a satisfying amount of sleep, you will likely feel more energized during the day," Reisman says. "The body's circadian rhythm or internal clock helps dictate when you are tired and awake and it is guided by variables such as light exposure and meal time. Once you have a regular ‘rhythm’, this will help in more restful and restorative sleep ."

In order to avoid these disruptions to your regularly-scheduled focus, "go to bed and wake up at the same time, even on weekends," MacDowell says. "Reduce your exposure to light at night , particularly blue light from TVs and electronics. Try to go to bed earlier, and resist the urge to sleep in or alter your sleep schedule." By waking up at the same time every day, you'll be doing your brain (and your long-suffering morning alarm) a huge favor.

Studies Referenced:

Phillips, A. J. K. (2017). Irregular sleep/wake patterns are associated with poorer academic performance and delayed circadian and sleep/wake timing. Scientific Reports , 7 (1). doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-03171-4

Fenichel, M. (2019). Sleep loss found to exacerbate spread of toxic protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Psychiatric News , 54 (8). doi: 10.1176/appi.pn.2019.4b27

Rose MacDowell , sleep expert and chief research officer at Sleepopolis

Dr. Steven Reisman , M.D., specialist with New York Cardiac Diagnostic Center

This article was originally published on Dec. 13, 2019

Question and Answer forum for K12 Students

Descriptive Essay Topic – A Day When Everything Went Wrong In School

A Day When Everything Went Wrong In School. You Can Find Previous Year Descriptive Essay Topics Asked In ICSE Board Exams.

Introduction: A day that one would like to forget for nothing good happened that day.

• Got up late in the morning for the half yearly exams
• Prepared for the wrong subject
• Punished for coming late

Conclusion: Even now have nightmare of that day when everything went wrong at school.

A day in school is normally like any other day, but there is a day that one would like to forget, for nothing good happens that day. Even now recalling it gives me nightmares. Last year in the midst of the half yearly examinations, I got up late in the morning. My head felt dizzy because of sleeping late the previous night, preparing for the English Language test.

Looking at the alarm clock left me pale. I had just ten minutes to board the school bus. I scrambled from bed, completed my daily chores in a jiffy. I had barely put on my trousers, when the horn of the school bus sounded. Clutching my bag, I hounded out of the driveway, but to my dismay the bus was nowhere in sight. Rushing back, I entreated my father to drop me to school in his car. He grudgingly agreed, after giving me a pep talk on being careless.

I reached school twenty minutes late, and was immediately ticked off by the monitor, who asked me to stay back after school as punishment. I took this in my stride, cursing my ill stars for the humiliation. On reaching the classroom, I took my seat and settled down for the test. The Question paper left me dumbstruck.

Was I hallucinating? I pinched myself to see if I was in my senses. Yes I was. I glanced at my wrist watch, it was indeed the 1st of September but the test slated was not English but Maths. The earth seemed to slip under my feet as I tried to come to terms with this catastrophe. Maths itself was my achilles heel, but to give a test without preparation was indeed a nightmare. I however gathered my wits and began to attempt the questions with trembling hands.

After two hours the ordeal was finally over. I had vision of a sound whacking, that was in store for me. I was morose throughout the lunch recess. My friend Arvind first laughed at my foolishness, but later comforted me allaying my fears. To add salt to injury, I was made to stand outside the class, for not bringing the Science book. I heaved a sigh of relief on hearing the toll of the school bell.

But alas! I had to stay back for detention, which meant catching a public bus to reach home. The journey in the bus was another shattering experience. It was packed to capacity and I could barely stand on my feet throughout the journey. A year has passed but I still have nightmare of that day, when everything went wrong at school. Recalling it sends a shiver down my spine.

Assignments

• Write a description of the happiest day in your life.
• Write about the saddest day of your life.

When and How to Write a Character Waking Up

Writing about a character waking up can be a challenge, especially since waking up is something we do in a semiconscious state. It can be tough to pinpoint exactly how it feels, and that makes it difficult to write convincingly. In addition to that, writers seem split on when to start a scene with a character waking up, and whether you should do it at all. 

Is It Bad To Start a Scene with a Character Waking Up?

If you’ve ever been in a creative writing or fiction class, then you’ve definitely been told that it is a bad idea to start a story or scene with your main character waking up. Most experienced writers and instructors strongly advise against it. But why? Is it always a bad idea?

And really, the answer is no; you can pull off a good waking up scene that draws readers into the story. By writing a character waking up in a specific way, you can set the tone for the rest of the scene and offer a unique glimpse into the character’s personality.

However, people tend to discourage starting a scene like this, not because it is inherently bad, but because it is a tactic often used lazily. Many beginner writers rely on this technique as an easy way to transition between scenes. If the transition is abrupt, glossed over, or otherwise disregarded by the writer, then it definitely won’t be taken seriously by the reader.

If you’re considering starting a scene, or your entire story, with your main character waking up, take a moment to consider why you want to write it like that. Do you have a good reason to? Is there another way you could start it? If you don’t have a good reason for writing it like that, you probably shouldn’t do it.

When to Write a Character Waking Up

If you’re going to show a character waking up, make sure there’s a good reason for it. If you just don’t know how else to start a story, and you have your character wake up and start making coffee, chances are your readers are going to get bored. 

If you want to keep your readers interested, focus on the implications of waking up. If your character is awake, then they have to do something. What is it they have to do? Are they looking forward to it, or dreading it? Do they struggle to get up, because they are injured, hungover, or groggy? Give the readers something to think about. Instead of just telling them the character is waking up, let them wonder why the character reacts a certain way when they do get up. 

The act of waking up is not inherently interesting, so it is your job to present it in an interesting way. Use it as a way of emphasizing something, like your character’s memories, fears, habits, and plans. Make waking up a point to focus on, instead of just a lazy transition. And, however tempting it may be, do not overuse this technique. If every scene starts with the character waking up, it’s going to feel mundane. 

If your character suffers from insomnia, then you may find yourself writing many scenes with them waking up, often still tired. If you want some guidance for writing about that specifically, I have another article that could help you out: Losing Sleep Over How to Write a Character with Insomnia?

How to Describe Waking Up

Waking up is a fundamental part of being human; we all do it. The next time you wake up in the morning or from a nap, try to focus on how it feels. Don’t reach for your phone or the lights, and instead think about what it feels like to come back to reality. Were you dreaming? Did you wake up slowly or abruptly? Did you set an alarm? How soon after waking up did you get out of bed? If you focus on how it really feels to do something in your life, you’ll be able to write about it more convincingly. 

With that said, obviously not everyone wakes up the same way. And of course, waking up in the middle of the night with a hangover is going to feel different from sleeping in late on a weekend. Writing about different situations is going to require different strategies.

(As a side note, if you want to write about drunk or hungover characters, I recommend taking a peek at my other article: How to Write a Drunk Character. )

How to Describe Someone Waking Up in the Morning

Waking up in the morning is generally pretty mundane, but there are ways to make it interesting. 

If the character wakes up naturally, then try to draw the scene out so it progresses in a slow and sleepy manner. Introduce details one at a time and try to show the process of things coming into focus. In general, try to avoid actually writing the phrase “things came into focus,” since you can show your readers how that feels instead of telling them that it’s happening.

Overload the scene with descriptive language and details. Bring the scene to life as much as possible, and really set the stage for the rest of the story. Describe what the character hears when they wake up, to clue the readers in to where the character lives. Do they hear birds or busy city streets? Do they hear nothing at all? What about how they feel? Is it cold? Bright?

Don’t just let readers know that the character is awake, let them experience what the character feels as they are waking up. In addition to the physical details, include little hints about the character’s personality based on how they feel about waking up. Instead of just mentioning the sounds of the city, you could describe it with negative language, to suggest that the character hates living in the city. Or, focus on the serene calmness of the sounds of nature and the coziness of the bed, to create a comfortable feeling right off the bat.

Alternatively, if the character wakes up to an alarm, they are probably going to wake up abruptly, and with less time to absorb their surroundings. Alarm clocks represent structure and routine, and your readers will immediately associate the character with being more systematic and less carefree. You should still set the scene with some descriptions to orient your audience, but in general, you should strive to cut back on the flowery language. The character needed to wake up to do something, so they can’t waste time listening to birds. 

How to Describe Someone Waking Up from a Nightmare

Like with an alarm clock, a person waking up from a nightmare is going to wake up rather suddenly. They probably won’t be paying attention to the details of the room, and instead, are going to be disoriented and frantic. A nightmare triggers the body’s fight-or-flight reflex, so the character’s heart will be beating fast, and they will be alert and ready to act to defend themself from whatever they were dreaming about.

After waking up, the character will need to calm down before they can get on with the story. This is a great opportunity to explore the impact of the nightmare and the sentiment of the character. Are bad dreams commonplace, or is the character unused to waking up like this? Is the nightmare an echo of a bad memory, or the result of some supernatural influence? 

Have the character think about the details of the dream after the fact, but do not explain the entire dream for the readers. Give little hints about what it could mean to give readers something to think about. If the dream is foreshadowing a future event or an ongoing struggle, don’t give everything away right from the beginning!

Your character may have a difficult time coming back to reality after a nightmare. When this happens, they could experience sleep paralysis upon waking up. This is when a person is unable to speak or move for several minutes after waking up, and may hallucinate seeing or feeling an evil presence like a demon, a figure from their past, or something they fear. You could use this as a tactic to extend the nightmare into the character’s waking life, to emphasize the impact the nightmares have on them.

If you want to read more about how to incorporate dreams and nightmares into your story, check out my article: Writing About Dreams and Nightmares .

How to Describe Someone Waking Up from Being Unconscious

If your character “fell asleep” as a result of getting knocked on the head then they aren’t going to wake up the same way as they would any other time. The first thing they’re going to notice as they wake up is how bad their head hurts. A person has to be hit really hard to lose consciousness, so your character is in for a pretty bad headache when they come to, and they’re going to notice the pain before they can register any other sensation. Make sure that is the first thing you mention unless the character is woken up forcefully by another character, a loud sound, or something else. 

Once the character has had time to overcome the pain, they’re probably going to be pretty disoriented. Show the character trying to work through exactly what happened before they fell unconscious, and have them try to sort through what they know and don’t know. Was it a bad fall? A fight? How much do they even remember? Help the readers along by having the character search for context, like what time it is, where they are, and how they managed to get hurt. 

Keep in mind that a character who is struck in the head hard enough to knock them out will endure a concussion. The article How to Write About Brain Damage (Accurately!) can walk you through the specifics of including that detail in your story.

How to Describe Someone Waking Up in an Unfamiliar Place

The perfect time to execute a scene that begins with the character waking up is with a kidnapping. Your character will be just as confused as the readers, and you can use that as your hook to keep readers engaged. 

If your character wakes up in an unfamiliar place, chances are, the first thing they’re going to do is start to panic. They may start to wake up groggily, but as soon as they realize they may be in danger, adrenaline is going to kick in and they’ll be fully awake in less than a second. 

They’re going to look around at everything to try to figure out where they are, so make sure you describe the scene in as much detail as possible. However, avoid the flowery language. If your character is terrified, they’re going to look at things and not really think about them much, so describe things quickly and visually—and move on. 

In this case, waking up isn’t the focus. Have the character realize the situation quickly, so they can progress the story. If they can’t move because they’re tied up, then they might start trying to think of how they got there, and who could be behind it. But in general, the character isn’t going to waste a whole lot of time before they start trying to do something to get out of the situation.

Some Parting Thoughts

No one should be able to tell you what you definitively should or should not write. There isn’t a wrong way to tell a story. If you think starting a scene with a character waking up is the best way to do that, then don’t let anyone stop you. It’s your story after all, and if you write it with care and passion, it’s going to be interesting.

If someone tells you not to write something, don’t take that advice at face value. Try to think about why they’re giving you that advice, and why they think it would help you. It’s not that starting a scene with a character waking up is bad, it’s just that most people don’t do it well. When people tell you not to do it, they’re actually telling you not to use cheap tricks to avoid writing difficult transitions. If you know how to handle a character waking up, then there’s no reason to shy away from putting it in your story.

• A2 Waking up Late Short Story

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i woke up late this morning

the alarm clock plug had fallen out of the outlet. i got up, opened the windows. the light coming in is getting yellower as the colors of the leaves change. i was surprised last spring how much darker my bedroom gets when the trees have leaves. i may need to get thicker blinds for winter.

i showered and brushed my teeth. put on some clothes, grabbed a granola bar, and put my laptop in my backpack. i got on my bike and started riding towards work. the air is getting cooler. i may need to stop wearing shorts and start wearing pants.

my office was very cold for most of the day. my fingers are particularly vulnerable working on a computer. i am thinking of bringing in an indoor thermometer so i can graph the temperature of my office from day to day. then again, a piece of cardboard covering up the vent would probably be more effective.

before i left for california i noticed some very fine cobwebs and infinitesimally small bugs on a few leaves of the ivy plant in my office window. i think they are aphids or spider mites. this morning i noticed some of the leaves had fallen off. i guess i should buy some kind of insecticide to spray on them.

at work i wrote sql queries and php code for measure’s financial system.

on the way home i stopped at cd alley to buy some cds. it would be perfect if they had wireless internet so i could listen to cds while checking email and researching bands. my life needs more music, downloading be damned. i’m not sure if what i just wrote means i will be downloading music or i won’t. i meant it to mean i will. i am loving the new modest mouse and death cab for cutie .

had a morningstar philly cheesesteak veggie burger for dinner with two thick sourdough pretzels and a glass of fruit punch. immediately put on a cd, started downloading and listening to music until almost 11pm. then went for a run.

You went for a run, tell me more… where do you run, for how long,…

i haven’t run for so long that i feel like i’m going to puke after a short while. i feel like the mucous and saliva i spit out along the way tastes like blood.

right now i’m running up greensboro street, then down hillsborough street to main street, then down weaver street back to greensboro street to home. takes about 30-40 minutes.

mmm… pretzels.

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When I Woke Up This Morning, Everything I Had Was Gone

By T. Coraghessan Boyle

The man I want to tell you about, the one I met at the bar at Jimmy’s Steak House, was on a tear. Hardly surprising, since this was a bar, after all, and what do people do at bars except drink, and one drink leads to another—and if you’re in a certain frame of mind, I suppose, you don’t stop for a day or two, or maybe more. But this man—he was in his forties, tall, no fat on him, dressed in a pair of stained Dockers and a navy-blue sweatshirt cut off raggedly at the elbows—seemed to have been going at it steadily for weeks, months even.

It was a Saturday night, rain sizzling in the streets and steaming the windows, the dinner crowd beginning to rouse itself over decaf, cheesecake, and V.S.O.P., and the regulars drifting in to look the women over and wait for the band to set up in the corner. I was new in town. I had no date, no wife, no friends. I was on something of a tear myself—a mini-tear, I guess you’d call it. The night before, I’d gone out with one of my co-workers, who, like me, was recently divorced, and we’d had dinner, gone to a couple of places afterward. But nothing came of it—she didn’t like me, and I could see that before we were halfway through dinner. I wasn’t her type, whatever that might have been, and I started feeling sorry for myself, I guess, and drank too much. When I got up in the morning, I made myself a Bloody Mary, with a can of Snap-E-Tom, a teaspoon of horseradish, and two jiggers of vodka, just to clear my head, then went out to breakfast at a place by the water and drank a glass or two of Chardonnay with my frittata and homemade duck sausage with fennel, and then I wandered over to a sports bar and then another place after that, and I never did any of the errands I’d been putting off all week—and I didn’t have any lunch, either. Or dinner. And so I drifted into Jimmy’s and there he was, the man in the sweatshirt, on his tear.

There was a space around him at the bar. He was standing, the stool shoved back and away from him as if he had no use for comfort, and his lips were moving, though nobody I could see was talking to him. A flashlight, a notebook, and a cigarette lighter were laid out in front of him on the mahogany bar, and, though Jimmy’s specialized in margaritas—there were eighteen different types of margaritas offered on the drinks menu—this man was apparently going the direct route. Half a glass of beer sat on the counter just south of the flashlight, and he was guarding three empty shot glasses as if he were afraid someone was going to run off with them. The bar was filling up. There were only two seats available in the place, one on either side of him. I was feeling a little washed out, my legs gone heavy on me all of a sudden, and I was thinking I might get a burger or a steak and fries at the bar. I studied him a moment, considered, then took the seat to his right and ordered a drink.

Our first communication came half a second later. He tapped my arm, gave me a long, tunnelled look, and made the universal two-fingered gesture for a smoke. Normally this would have irritated me—the law says you can no longer smoke in a public place in this state, and in any case I don’t smoke and never have—but I was on a tear myself, I guess, and just gave him a smile and shrugged my shoulders. He turned away from me then, to flag down the bartender and order another shot—he was drinking Herradura Gold—and a beer chaser. There was a ritualistic moment during which he took a bite from the wedge of lime the bartender provided, sprinkled salt onto the webbing between the thumb and index finger of his left hand, licked it off, and threw back the shot, after which the beer came into play. He exhaled deeply, and then his eyes migrated back to me. “Nice to see you,” he said, as if we’d known each other for years.

I said it was nice to see him, too. The gabble of voices around us seemed to go up a notch. A woman at the end of the bar began to laugh with a thick, dredging sound.

He leaned in confidentially. “You know,” he said, “people drink for a lot of reasons. You know why I drink? Because I like the taste of it. Sweet and simple. I like the taste.”

I told him I liked the taste of it, too, and then he made a fist and cuffed me lightly on the meat of the arm. “You’re all right—you know that?” He held out his hand as if we’d just closed a deal, and I took it. I’ve been in business for years—for all but one of the years since I left college—and it was just a reflex to give him my name. He didn’t say anything in response, just stared into my eyes, grinning, until I said, “And what do I call you?”

The man looked past me, his eyes groping toward the red-and-green neon sign with neatly bunched palm trees that glowed behind the bar and apprised everyone of the name of the establishment. It took him a minute, but then he dropped my hand and said, “Just call me Jimmy.”

After a couple of drinks at a bar, after the subjects of sports, movies, and TV have been exhausted, people tend to talk about liquor, about the people they know who drink too much, fly off the handle, and wind up wrecking their lives and the lives of everyone around them, and then they tend to get specific. This man—Jimmy—was no different. Alcoholism ran in his family, he told me. His father had died in the streets when he was younger than Jimmy was now, a transient, a bum, useless to the world and, more emphatically, to his wife and children. And Jimmy himself had a problem. He admitted as much.

A year before, he’d been living on the East Coast, in a town up the Hudson River, just outside New York. He taught history at the local high school, and he’d come to it late, after working a high-stress job in Manhattan and commuting for years. History was his passion, and he hadn’t had time to stagnate in the job like so many of his fellow-teachers, who went through the motions as if they were the walking dead. He loved sports, too. He was a jogger, a tennis player, and a mountain biker, and he coached lacrosse in the fall and baseball in the spring. He was married to a girl he’d met in his senior year at the state university in Albany. They’d had a son—“Call him Chris,” he said, looking to the neon sign again—and he’d coached Chris in high school, then watched him go on to college himself as a newly minted freshman at an Ivy League school.

That was all right. Everything was all right. The school year began, and Jimmy dug out his notes, xeroxed study guides, looked up and down the class register and saw whom he could trust and whom he’d have to watch. In the mornings, before it was light, he ate breakfast alone in the kitchen, listening to the soft hum of the classic-rock station, the hits that took him back, hits he hadn’t heard in years, because Chris had always had the radio tuned to hip-hop or the alternative station. Above him, in the master bedroom, Caroline was enjoying the luxury of sleeping late after thirteen years of scrambling eggs and buttering toast and seeing her son off to school. It was still dark when Jimmy climbed into his car, and most mornings he was the first one in the building, striding down the wide polished halls in a silence that could have choked on itself.

Fall settled in early that year, a succession of damp glistening days that took the leaves off the trees and fed on the breath of the wind. It seemed to do nothing but rain, day after day. The sky never swelled to flex its glory; the sun never shone. He saw a photo in the paper of a bare-chested jogger on the beach in Key Biscayne and felt reality slipping away from him. One afternoon, he was out on the field behind the school—the lacrosse team was scrimmaging with a bigger, more talented squad from a prep school upstate—and he suddenly couldn’t focus on the game. The assistant coach, no more than three or four years out of school himself, stepped up and took over the hectoring and the shoulder-patting, managed the stream of substitutions, and curbed the erupting tempers—discipline, that’s what Jimmy taught above all else, because in a contact sport the team that controls its emotions will win every time—while the clock ticked off the minutes to the half and the rain whitened to sleet.

The sticks flashed, the players hurtled past him, grunting and cursing. He stood there in the weather, a physical presence, chilled, his hair wet, yet he wasn’t there at all. He was reliving an episode from the previous year, when his son had been the star player on the team, a moment like this one—the field slick, the players’ legs a patchwork of mud, stippled flesh, and dark blooming contusions. Chris had the ball. Two defenders converged on him, and Jimmy—the coach, the father—could see it all coming, the collision that would break open the day, bone to bone, the concussion, the shattered femur, the injury to the spinal cord, to the brain. The sound of it—the sick wet explosion—froze him so that he couldn’t even go to his son, couldn’t move. But then, a miracle, Chris pushed himself up from the icy turf, stiff as a rake, and began to walk it off.

Jimmy awoke to the fact that someone was tugging at his arm. “Coach,” somebody was saying—it was Mary-Louise, the principal’s secretary, and what was she doing out here in this weather, the sleet caught like dander in the drift of her hairdo, which must have cost sixty-five dollars to streak and color and set? “Jimmy,” she said. “You need to call your wife.” Her face fell, the white pellets pounded her hair. “It’s an emergency.”

He used the phone in the history chair’s office, more weary than anything else. Since Chris had left home, everything seemed to set off alarm bells in Caroline’s head—she thought she heard a sound in the front end of the car, the telephone had rung three times in succession but nobody was there, the cat was refusing to eat and she was sure it was feline leukemia, because she’d just read an article about it in the local paper. What would it be this time—a furtive scratching in the attic? Mold eating at the caulking around the tub? He thought nothing. Stared at the crescent of white beach on the marked-up calendar tacked to the wall behind Jerry Mortensen’s desk, as he dialled, and wished he could feel some sun on his face for a change. Florida. Maybe they’d go to Florida for the holidays, if Chris was up for it.

Caroline picked up on the second ring, and her words burned a hole right through him. “It’s Chris,” she said. “He’s in the hospital.” There was no quaver, no emotion, no cracking around the edges of what she was trying to convey. “He’s in the hospital,” she repeated.

“The hospital?”

“Jimmy,” she said, and her voice cracked now, snapped like a compound fracture. “Jimmy. He’s dying.”

Dying? An eighteen-year-old athlete with a charmer’s smile and no bad habits, heart like a clock, limbs of hammered wire, studious, dutiful, not a wild bone in his body?

There had been a party the night before. The streets were slick, power lines were down, rain turned to ice, ice to snow. Chris was one of twelve pledges at Delta Upsilon, a party-hearty fraternity that offered instant access to the social scene, and it was the pledges’ responsibility to pick up the party supplies—beer, vodka, cranberry juice, chips and salsa, and bunting to drape over the doorways of the big white ocean liner of a house, which had belonged to a shipping magnate at the turn of the last century. None of them had a car, so they had to walk into town and back, three trips in all, over sidewalks that were like bobsled runs, the snow so thick it was coming down in clumps, and somebody—it was Sonny Hammerschmitt, twenty-three years old, fresh from four years in the Navy, and the only one of them who didn’t need a fake I.D.—suggested that they stop in at the Owl’s Eye and sneak a quick beer to get in the party mood. Chris tried to talk them out of it. “Are you kidding?” he said, a cardboard box bristling with the amber necks of tequila bottles perched up on one shoulder, while cars shushed by on the street and the intermediate distance blurred to white. “Dagan’ll kill us if he finds out.”

“Fuck Dagan. What’s he going to do, blackball us? All of us?”

A snowball careened off the box, and Chris almost lost his grip on it. Everybody was laughing, breath steaming, faces red with novelty, with hilarity and release. He set down the box and pelted his pledge mates with snowballs, each in his turn. Directly across the street was the bar, a nondescript shingled building with a steep-pitched roof that might have been there when the Pilgrims came over—ancient, indelible, rooted like the trees. It was getting dark. Snow frosted the roof; the windows were pools of gold. A car crept up the street, chains jingling on its rear tires. Chris threw back his head and closed his eyes a moment, the snow accumulating like a cold compress on his eyelids. “Sure,” he said. “O.K. Why not? But just one, and then we’d better . . .” but he never finished the thought.

Inside, it was like another world, like a history lesson, with jars of pickled eggs and Polish sausage lined up behind the bar, a display of campaign buttons from the forties and fifties—“I Like Ike”—and a fireplace, a real fireplace, split oak sending up fantails of sparks against a backdrop of blackened brick. The air smelled sweet—it wasn’t a confectionery sweetness, or the false scent of air freshener, either, but the smell of wood and wood smoke, pipe tobacco, booze. Sonny got two pitchers of beer, and shots of peppermint schnapps all around. They were there for no more than half an hour—Dagan Drava, their pledgemaster, really would have their hides if he ever found out—and they drank quickly, greedily, drank as if they were getting away with something. Which they were. The snow mounted on the ledge outside the window. They had two more shots each and refilled the pitchers at least once, or maybe it was twice.

Then it was the party, a blur of grinning, lurching faces, the music like a second pulse, the laughter of the girls, the brothers treating the pledges almost like human beings, and everything made special by the snow that was still coming down, coming harder, coming like the end of the world. Every time the front door opened, the smell of it took hold of you as if you’d been plunged into a cold stream on the hottest day in August, and there would be two girls, two more girls, in knit hats pulled down to the eyebrows and scarves flung over their shoulders, stamping the snow from their boots and shouting, “A beer! A beer! My kingdom for a beer!”

Time contracted. One minute Chris and his pledge mates were scrambling to replenish the drinks and snacks on the big table in the dining room, everything reeking of spilled beer and tequila, as if a sea of it had washed through the house, from the attic on down to the basement, and the next minute the girls were gone, the night was settling in, and Dagan was there, cracking the whip. “All right, you dogs, I want this place clean—spotless, you understand me? You’ve got ten minutes, ten minutes and all the trash is out of here and every scrap of this shit off the floor.” The rest of the brothers were standing around now, post-party, working on the keg—the ones who weren’t off getting laid, that is—and they added jeers and head slaps, barking out random orders and making the pledges drop for twenty at the slightest provocation (and being alive, breathing, and present seemed provocation enough).

Like any other healthy eighteen-year-old, Chris drank, and he’d tried just about everything at least once. He was no angel on a pedestal, Jimmy knew that, and drinking—the taste for it—ran in his blood, sure it did, but in high school it had been beer only, and never to excess. Chris was afraid of what alcohol would do to him, to his performance on the field, to his grades, and more often than not he was the one who wound up driving everybody home after the post-game parties. But here he was, dense with it, his head stuffed full of cellulose, a screen pulled down over his eyes. He moved slowly and deliberately, lurching behind a black plastic bag full of wet trash, fumbling with the broom, the dustpan, listening for Dagan’s voice in the mélange of shouts and curses and too loud dance music as if it were the one thing he could cling to, the one thing that would get him through this and into the shelter of his bed in the windowless room behind the stairway on the second floor.

“Wait a minute, what’s this? Hey, Dagan. Dagan. You see this?” It was the guy they called Pillar, a senior who wore a perpetual look of disappointment on his face and was said to have once won the drinking contest at Harry’s Bar in Key West by outlasting a three-hundred-pound Samoan through sixteen rounds of mojitos. He was holding up two still-sealed bottles of Don José tequila.

Dagan’s face floated into the picture. “I see what you mean, bro—the place just isn’t clean, is it? I mean, would you want to operate under these conditions?”

“Uh-uh, no way,” Pillar said. “Not while these motherfucking bottles are sitting here. I’m offended. I really am. How about you, Dagan? Aren’t you offended?”

Dude. That was what they called the drinking game, though Chris had never heard of it before and would never hear of it again. Dude , __that was all, and the whole house was chanting it now, “Dude! Dude! Dude!’’ Dagan marched the pledges down to the game room in the basement, made them line up against the back wall, and handed each of them a shot glass. This was where the big-screen TV was, where the whole house gathered to watch the Pats and the Celtics and the porn videos that made your blood surge till you thought it was going to keep on going right out the top of your head.

It was 2 a.m. Chris couldn’t feel his legs. Everything seemed funny suddenly, and he was laughing so hard he thought he was going to bring it all up, the beer, the schnapps, the pepperoni pizza and the chips and salsa and the Cheez Doodles, and his pledge mates were laughing, too. Dude , the funniest thing in the world. Then Dagan slipped the video into the VCR—“Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”—and gave them their instructions, serious business now, a ritual, and no fooling around (“I’m serious, people, and wipe the smirks off your faces—you are in deep shit now”). Music, a flash of color, and there was Keanu Reeves, with his slice of an Asiatic face and disappearing eyes, playing the fool, or maybe playing to type, and every time he uttered the monosyllabic tag that gave the game its name, the pledge class had to lift the glasses to their lips and down a shot—“Hey, dude,” “ ’S up, dude”—till both bottles were drained.

Benny Chung was the first one to break. He was seventeen, a National Merit Scholarship finalist, with narrow shoulders, wrists you could loop two fingers around, and a head that seemed to float up like a balloon from the tether of his neck. His shoulders dipped forward as if he were trying to duck under a low-hanging limb, then his lips pulled back and he spewed all over the floor and his pant legs and his black high-top Converse sneakers. It was a heroic effort, so much of that umber chowder coming out of so frail a vessel, and Benny had to go down on one knee to get it all out. Nobody said anything, and nobody was laughing now. Up on the screen, Keanu Reeves said the magic word, and all the pledges, including Benny, hammered another shot. Benny couldn’t hold it, though, and neither could Chris. Chris saw the look on Benny’s face—the outrage of an entire organism and all its constituent cells—and he felt his own legs buckling and the release the first wave of nausea gave him, and then he felt nothing more.

All the Delts were swarming the room now, expostulating over this disgusting display, this pathetic showing on the part of a pledge class that wasn’t worthy of the name, and hands took hold of Benny and Chris, people shouting and jostling, the whinny of laughter, cries of “Gross!” and “Don’t get any of that shit on me, man,” the hands finding purchase at armpit and knee. They laid Benny and Chris side by side on Chris’s bed, then thundered back down the two flights of stairs to the game room. Half an hour went by and both bottles of Don José were drained by the time anyone thought to look in on them, and another ten minutes elapsed before Dagan Drava, a pre-med student, realized that Chris wasn’t breathing.

“So he was drunk,” Jimmy told me, the band into its opening number now—blues, they were doing a blues tune that seemed vaguely familiar—“and who hasn’t been drunk? I’ve been drunk a thousand times in my life, you know what I mean? So I figure, all the way up there with Caroline hyperventilating and what-if-ing and driving me half crazy, that we’re going to walk into the hospital and he’ll be sitting up in bed with a sheepish grin on his face, one hell of a headache, maybe, and a lesson learned, but no harm done.”

Jimmy was wrong. His son had choked on his own vomit, inhaled it, compromising his lungs. No one knew how long he’d been lying there in the bed next to Benny Chung without drawing a breath before the E.R. team re-started his heart, and no one was sure how much damage had been done to his brain functions. A CT scan showed edema of the brain tissue. He was in a coma. A machine was breathing for him. Caroline went after the doctors like an inquisitor, relentless, terrifying in her grief. She stalked the halls, chased them to their cars, harangued them on the phone, demanded—and got—the top neurologist in New England. Chris’s eyes never opened. Beneath the lids, like a dirty secret, his pupils dilated to full and stayed there, focussed on nothing. Two days later, he was dead.

I bought Jimmy a drink, watched myself in the mirror behind the bar. I didn’t look like anybody I knew, but there I was, slouched over my drink, taking in air and letting it seep back out again. The woman with the deep-dredged laugh was gone. A couple in their twenties had settled into the vacant spot on the other side of Jimmy, oblivious of the drama that had just played out here, the woman perched on the barstool while the man stood in place, rocking in her arms to the beat of the music. The band featured a harp player, and he moved round the confines of the stage like a caged animal, riffling the notes till he’d gone all the way from despair to disbelief and back again, the bass player leaning in as if to brace himself, the guitar rising up slow and mournful out of the stew of the backbeat.

“Hey, don’t feel sorry for me,” Jimmy said. “I’m out here in California having the time of my life.” He pointed a finger at the rain-streaked window. “All this sun really cheers me up.”

I don’t know why I asked—I was drunk, I guess, feeling maudlin, who knows?—but I said, “You got a place to stay tonight?”

He looked into the shot glass as if he might discover a motel key at the bottom of it. “I’m on sabbatical,” he said. “Or on leave, actually. I was staying with my brother—up on Olive Mill—but he got to be a pain in the ass. Caroline couldn’t take it. She’s back in New York. At least, I think she is.”

“Hard luck,” I said, just to say something.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Sure, and that’s the long and the short of it. But I tell you, I clean up real nice, and what I plan to do is pick up one of these spare women here, like that one over there—the dye job that looks like she just crawled out of a coffin? She’ll take me home with her, what you want to bet? And what you want to bet she’s got a shower, maybe even a Jacuzzi?”

I didn’t want to bet anything. I wanted another drink, that was all. And after that I wanted to have maybe one more, at this place up the street I’d been to a couple of times, just to see what was happening, because it was Saturday night and you never knew.

A week later—it was the next Friday, actually—I went into a place down in the marina for cocktails with a woman I’d almost picked up after I left Jimmy at the steak house the previous Saturday. Her name was Steena, she was five-ten, blond, and just getting over a major breakup with a guy named Steve whose name dropped from her lips with the frequency of a speech impediment. She’d agreed to “have a drink” with me, and though I’d hoped for more, I had to assume, after we’d had two glasses each of Piper-Heidsieck at twelve and a half dollars per and a plate of oysters, that I wasn’t her type, either. The whole time she kept glancing at her watch, and finally her cell phone rang and she got up from the table and went out into the anteroom to take the call. It was Steve. She was sorry, but he wanted to meet her later, for dinner, and he sounded so sad and heartbroken and shot through with misery and contrition that she couldn’t refuse. I had nothing to say. I just stared at her, the plate of desecrated oysters between us. “So,” she said, hovering over the table as if she were afraid to sit back down, “I guess I’m going to have to say goodbye. It’s been nice, though. Really.”

I paid the waitress and moved up to the bar, idly watching the Lakers go through their paces with the sound muted and gazing out the window at the pale bleached forest of the ships’ masts gathered there against the night. I was drinking brandy-and-water, picking through a bowl of artificial snack food and waiting for something to happen, when I ran into the other man I wanted to tell you about. Shaq’s monumental head loomed up on the screen and then faded away again, and I turned around and there the guy was, just settling into the seat beside me. For a minute, I thought he was Jimmy—he had the same hangdog look, the rangy height, the air of an athlete gone to seed—and it gave me a start, because the last thing I needed the way I was feeling was another bout of one-way commiseration. He nodded a greeting, then looked up at the screen. “What’s the score?”

“The Lakers are killing them,” I said. “I think. I’m pretty sure, anyway.” But this was Jimmy, had to be, Jimmy all dressed up, with his hair combed and looking satisfied with himself. It was then that I remembered the brother. “You wouldn’t be Jimmy’s brother, would you?” I said. “By any chance?”

“ Whose brother?”

I felt foolish then. Obviously, Jimmy hadn’t given me his real name, and why would he? The alcohol bloomed in my brain, petals unfolding like a rosebud in time-lapse photography. “It’s nothing,” I said. “I just thought . . .” I let it die, and went back to watching the game. Helped myself to the snacks. Had another brandy-and-water. After a while, the man beside me ordered dinner at the bar, and I got into a conversation about recycling and the crime of waste with a startled-looking woman and her Martini-fuelled husband. Gradually, the bar filled up. The startled-looking woman and her husband went in to dinner and somebody else took their place. Nothing was happening. Absolutely nothing. I was thinking that I should move on, pick up a pizza, some takeout, make it an early night, and I could envision myself standing at the supercharged counter of Paniagua’s Pizza Palace, where you could get two slices with chorizo and jalapeños for three dollars and fifty cents, but instead I found myself turning to the man on my left. “You do have a brother, though, right?” I said.

He gave me a long, slow, deliberate look, then shrugged. “What, does he owe you money?”

So we talked about Jimmy, Jimmy’s tragedy, Jimmy’s refusal to accept facts, and the way Jimmy was running hard up against the sharp edges of the world and was sure to wind up in a coffin, just like his father before him and his son, too, if he didn’t get himself into rehab as his No. 1 priority. Then we talked about me, but I didn’t reveal much, and then it was general subjects, the look of the people on TV as opposed to the look of the flesh-and-blood people sitting at the tables at our feet like an undiscovered tribe, and then, inevitably, we came back to alcohol. I told him about some of my escapades; he told me about his. I was probably on my sixth or seventh brandy-and-water when we got back as far as our mutual childhoods lived mutually under the shadow of booze, though on opposite coasts. The brother was in an expansive mood, his wife and six-year-old daughter gone for the weekend to a Little Miss pageant in Sacramento, and the four walls of his house—or eight or sixteen or however many there were—inadequate to contain him. I took a sip of my drink and let him fly.

He was three years older than Jimmy, and they had two other brothers and a sister, all younger. They had moved around a lot as kids, but one winter they were living out in Dutchess County, at the junction of two blacktop roads where there were a handful of summer cabins that had been converted to cheap year-round housing, a two-pump gas station where you could get milk, bread, and Coke in eight-ounce bottles, and a five-stool roadhouse called the Pine-Top Tavern, with a jukebox and a griddle. The weather turned nasty, their father was out of work and about a month from bailing out for good, and neither of their parents left the tavern for more than a shower or a shave or to put a couple of cans of chicken broth in a saucepan and dump a handful of rice and sliced wieners in on top of it so the kids would have something to eat. Jimmy’s brother had a cough that wouldn’t go away. Their little sister had burned her arm on the stove trying to make herself a can of tomato soup, and the brother had to change her bandage twice a day and rub ointment into the exfoliated skin. Jimmy spent his time out in the weed-blistered lot behind the house, kicking a football as close to vertical as he could, over and over again, then slanting off to retrieve it before it could hit the ground. Their dog—Gomer, named after the TV character—had been killed crossing the road on Christmas Eve, and their father blamed one of the drunks leaving the tavern, but nobody did anything about it.

It was just after Christmas—or maybe after New Year’s, because school had started up again—when a cold front came down off Hudson Bay and froze everything so thoroughly that nobody could stand to be out-of-doors for more than five minutes at a time. The birds huddled under the eaves of the tavern, looking distressed; the squirrels hung like ornaments in the stripped trees. Everybody in the family drank hot tea thick with honey and the oily residue of the bitter lemon juice that came out of a plastic squeeze bottle, and that was the only time their hands seemed to warm up. When they went outside, the bare ground crackled underfoot as if it were crusted with snow and, for a few days there, none of the converted cabins had water, because the lines from the well had frozen underground.

Jimmy’s brother remembered his father, wizened forearms propped up on the bar in a stained khaki parka he’d worn in Korea, a sheaf of hair canted the wrong way because it hadn’t seen a comb in days, the smoke of his cigarette fuming in the dark forge of the bar. And his mother, happiest woman in the world, laughing at anything, laughing till all the glasses were drained and the lights went out and the big-bellied bartender shooed them out the door and locked the place up for the night.

It was cold. The space heater did nothing, less than nothing, and Jimmy’s brother could have earned his merit badge as a fire starter that winter because all he did was scavenge the skeletal forest for fallen branches, rotten stumps, and fence posts, anything that would burn, managing to keep at least a continuous smolder going day and night. And then he got up for school one morning and there was an old woman—or a woman his mother’s age, anyway—laid out snoring on the couch in front of the fireplace where the dog used to sleep. He went into his parents’ room and shook his mother awake. “There’s somebody sleeping out there on the couch,” he told her, and watched her gather her features together and assess the day. He had to repeat himself twice, her warmth and the warmth of his father beside her rising up to him with a sweet-sick odor of sex and infirmity, and then she murmured through her cracked lips, “Oh, that’s only Grace. You know Grace—from the tavern? Her car won’t start, that’s all. Be a good boy, huh, and don’t wake her?”

He didn’t wake her. He got his brothers and sister out of bed, then huddled with them at the bus stop in the dark, jumping from foot to foot to keep warm and imagining himself on a polar expedition with Amundsen, sled dogs howling at the stars and the ice plates shifting like dominoes beneath their worn and bleeding paws. There was a pot on the stove when he got home from school, some sort of incarnadine stew with a smell of the exotic spices his mother never used—mace, cloves, fennel—and he thought of Grace, with her scraggle of gray-black hair and her face that was like a dried-up field plowed in both directions. He tasted it—they all sampled it, just to see if it was going to be worth eating—and somehow it even managed to taste of Grace, though how could anybody know what Grace tasted like unless they were a cannibal?

His parents weren’t at home. They were three hundred feet away, in the tavern, with Grace and the rest of their good-time buddies. A few dispirited snowflakes sifted down out of the sky. He made himself a sandwich of peanut butter and sliced banana, then went over to the tavern to see if his parents or anybody else there was in that phase of rhapsodic drunkenness where they’d give up their loose change as if they were philanthropists rolling down Park Avenue in an open Rolls-Royce. One guy, hearty, younger than the rest, in a pair of galoshes with the buckles torn off, gave him a fifty-cent piece, and then his father told him to get the hell out of the bar and stay out till he was of legal age or he’d kick his ass for him but good.

The next morning was even colder, and Jimmy’s brother was up early, shivering despite the rancid warmth generated by his three brothers and the cheap sleeping bag advertised for comfort even at five below zero, which might as well have been made of shredded newspaper for all the good it did. He put the kettle on to boil so they could have tea and instant oatmeal to fortify them out there in the wind while they were waiting for the school bus to come shunting down the hill with its headlights reduced to vestigial eyes and the driver propped up behind the black windshield like a blind cave fish given human form. The house was dark but for the overhead light in the kitchen. There was no sound anywhere, nothing from his parents or his brothers and sister, everybody locked in a sleep that was like a spell in a fairy tale, and he missed the dog then, if only to see it stretch and yawn and nose around in its dish. The kettle came to a boil, and he’d actually put three tea bags in the pot and begun pouring the water before he realized that something was wrong. What was it? He strained his ears, but there was nothing to hear. Not even the tick of the stove or the creak and whine of the house settling into the cold, no sound of stirring birds or tires revolving on the blacktop road. It was then that he thought to check the time.

There was a clock built into the stove, foreshortened hands painted gold behind a greased-over plastic lens. It was 3:35 a.m. Jimmy’s brother could have kicked himself. He sat in the kitchen, shivering, and drank a cup of tea, wishing it would snow so they’d call off school and he could sleep all day. After a while, he decided to build up the fire in the living room and sit there on the couch and terrify himself with “Dracula”_—_he was only halfway through, though he’d started it at Halloween—and then maybe he’d drift off for a while till it was time to get up. He shrugged into his coat and went to the kitchen door, thinking of the punky wood he and Jimmy had stacked in the shed over the weekend.

But then—and I was ahead of him here, because you’d have had to be as blind as a cave fish yourself not to see where this was going—the storm door wouldn’t give. There was something there, an immovable shadow stretched long and dark across the doorstep, and it took everything the brother had to wedge the door open enough to squeeze out into the night. And when he did pull himself out into the cold, and the killing, antipathetic breath of it hit him full in the face, he willed the shadow at his feet to take shape until he could distinguish the human form there, with her fixed eyes and the dirty scraggle of gray-black hair.

“Grace?” I said.

Jimmy’s brother nodded.

“Jesus,” I said. “And your brother—did he see her there?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. She was a drunk, that was all, just another drunk.”

We sat for a moment, looking past our drinks to the marina and the black unbroken plane of the sea beyond it. I had an impulse to open up to him, to tell him my story, or one of my stories, as if we were clasping hands at an A.A. meeting, but I didn’t. I made a clucking sound, meant to signify sympathy and understanding, threw some money on the bar, and went out the door, feeling for my keys. What I didn’t tell him, though he might have known it himself, was that Jimmy had put his son in a crematory box at the hospital and put the box in the back of his Suburban and driven it home and into the garage, and all night, while his wife lay stiff and sedated in the big queen-size bed upstairs, Jimmy had hugged the coffin to him. I didn’t tell him that life is a struggle against weakness, fought not in the brain or in the will but in the cells, in the enzymes, in the key that DNA inserts into the tumbler of our personalities. And I didn’t tell him that I had a son myself, just like Jimmy, though I didn’t see him as much as I would have wanted to, not anymore.

The fact was that I hadn’t wanted a son, hadn’t planned on it or asked or prayed or hoped for or even imagined it. I was twenty-four. My wife was pregnant and I raged at her, Get rid of it, you’re ruining my life, we can’t afford it, you’re crazy, get rid of it, get rid of it . __She was complete in herself, sweet-faced and hard-willed, and mine was a voice she couldn’t hear. She went to Lamaze classes, quit drinking, quit smoking, did her exercises, read all the books. My son was born in the Kaiser hospital in Panorama City, eight pounds, six ounces, as healthy as a rat and beautiful in his own way, and I was his father, though I wasn’t ready to be. He was nine months old when one of my drinking buddies—call him Chris, why not?—came for the weekend and we went on a tear. My wife put up with it, even joined in a bit, and on Monday morning, when she had to go in early to work, Chris and I took her out for breakfast.

The day beat down like a hammer and everything in the visible world shone as if it had been lit from within. We’d been up till four, and now it was seven, and while we were waiting for a table Chris and I ducked into the men’s room and alternated hits from a pint of Smirnoff we were planning to doctor our fresh-squeezed orange juice with. So we were feeling fine as we pushed the waffles around our plates and my wife smiled and joked and the baby unfurled his arms and grabbed at things in high baby spirits. Then my wife touched up her makeup and left, and right away the mood changed. Here was this baby, my son, with his multiplicity of needs, his diapers and his stroller and all the rest of it, and I was in charge.

We finally hit upon the plan of taking him to the beach, to get a little sun, throw a Frisbee, let the sand mold itself to us through the long, slow-simmering morning and into the afternoon and the barbecue I was planning for Chris’s sendoff. The beach was deserted, a board-stretched canvas for gulls and pelicans and snapping blue waves, and as soon as we stepped out of the car I felt that everything was all right again. My son was wearing nothing but his diaper, and Chris and I were laughing over something, and I tossed my son up in the air, a game we played, and he loved it, squealing and crying out in baby ecstasy. I tossed him again, and then I tossed him to Chris and Chris tossed him back, and that was when I lost my balance and the black sea-honed beak of a half-buried rock loomed up on me and I saw my future in that instant: I was going to drop my son, let him slip through my fingers in a moment of aberration, and he was going to be damaged in a way that nobody could repair.

It didn’t happen. I caught him, and held on, and I never let go. ♦

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Cause & Effect Essay: Waking Up Late

We’ve all done it. (We’d be lying if we said we hadn’t). We wake up at 8:42 a.m. after hitting the snooze button at least nine times and launch out of bed in a panic. Work starts in 18 minutes. A shower is skipped and teeth are brushed with water and a finger. Breakfast consists of coffee and a donut from a drive-through franchise. The entire morning is a frantic rush and the day starts out on an awful note. So why does this happen? And what are the unpleasant results?

Most of the time, sleeping in is caused by not going to bed early enough. People ‘sacrifice their future selves’ by staying up late watching movies, texting friends, playing video games or returning e-mails. The human body needs sleep and, if it can’t get it at night … it’ll try for it in the morning. The body also needs a consistent routine. People who get up at eleven a.m. on the weekend and then attempt to get up at seven a.m. on Monday are in for a rough road. Another bad habit that causes people to wake up later than they want to includes not preparing properly for sleep. The body needs proper wind-down time so it can get ready for its rest period. This means no work, eating, or television five seconds before heading for bed.

Sleeping in can have negative effects on the body. A main consequence of waking up late is bad eating habits. People who are behind schedule tend to reach for high-calorie convenience food and, because their schedule is thrown off, eat when they’re not even hungry. Other consequences of sleeping in include stress, weight gain, weight loss, voice problems, headaches, and body aches. The body needs rest and likes it to be consistent. There are some theories that say people without proper sleep habits have a higher chance of developing cancer, diabetes, and hypertension. People who sleep in one day may struggle with getting to sleep the next night, and might resort to sleeping pills – a habit that might turn into an unbreakable cycle.

People who sleep in often find that their career is affected. After jerking out of bed and rushing to the office, a person might be distracted, frazzled, and unfocused. Being late will give an employee a bad reputation and might even lead to termination. Chances are, your appearance will be questionable too. Basically, you will be a dishevelled, distracted, tired employee who can’t do their job properly.

So what’s the solution? Setting a schedule for sleep and having a consistent routine will help the brain activate ‘sleep’ and ‘wake’ hormones at the appropriate times. Also, learning to relax before bed will make it easier to fall asleep in the first place. Turning off the television and exchanging that time for yoga, deep breathing, reading, or quiet time will go a long way towards a better sleep routine.

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I Woke Up One Morning

A collection of rhymes, featuring tales of extraordinary encounters with various creatures!

Listen to the audio book

Bedtime story nursery rhymes written by Mary Luciano

Illustrated by brett curzon.

© Mary Luciano 2016

About the Author

Mary Luciano is originally from London, England and now lives in Sydney Australia with her husband Adrian and two young children, Jake (4) and Luke (2).  Mary has always been passionate about writing and has been involved in this area in the form of editing, proofreading and business writing most of her adult life. “I Woke Up This Morning Only To Find” is Mary’s first book and was borne from a desire to connect to the imagination of her children with her love of writing. You can purchase this book at Mary’s website  – click here.

About the Illustrator

Brett Curzon has been able to perfectly match the prose with the most beautiful illustrations, perfectly encapsulating the imaginative theme of the book. Brett is an extremely talented and very well regarded illustrator who has been involved in a number of publications including his own.

Let’s Chat About The Stories ~ Ideas for Talking With Kids

1. Can you imagine something strange and wonderful happening to you in your everyday life? Tell a little story about it!

Benefits of Waking Up Early in the Morning Essay

If you’re a night owl, you might be wondering if there’s any benefit to waking up early in the morning. And if you’re a morning person, you may wonder what the benefits of staying up late at night are. In this post, we’re going to look at both sides of the story, and explain why it makes sense to wake up early in the morning.

• You will be more productive during your day. When you wake up earlier, you will have a lot less time to waste. It will be more difficult for you to procrastinate and find reasons not to start working on your tasks. If you start to feel tired or stressed at work, you can take some time off.
• You will have more energy throughout the day. Waking up early will give you more energy throughout your day. This means that you will have more time to accomplish things and feel more energized. When you wake up later in the morning, it’s hard to get out of bed because you are exhausted.
• You will be happier throughout the day. If you wake up early, you will be more focused and energetic. When you wake up late, you will tend to feel sleepy, lazy and unfocused.
• You will be more productive throughout the day. Waking up early will give you a lot more time to work on your tasks. You can also get some exercise before work.
• You will have less stress throughout the day. Waking up early will allow you to enjoy your morning routine without feeling stressed out. When you are stressed, you will not be able to concentrate on your tasks.
• You will have more time to accomplish your tasks. Waking up early will give you more time to accomplish your tasks. When you are tired, you won’t be able to accomplish your tasks as quickly. If you want to do more things at work, you need to wake up earlier.
• You will be more focused at work. Waking up early gives you more time to focus at work. When you wake up late, you will feel sleepy and unfocused. As a result, you will not be as productive at work. When you wake up early, you will have more time to get ready for work.

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