Submitted by dylancatlow t3_1130u8q in todayilearned
Reply to comment by Some0neAwesome in TIL that the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night" was the opening line to an actual novel published in 1830, but runs on for another 51 words: "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which..." by dylancatlow
Which gave rise to the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest, which each year challenges participants "to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written."
Lmao omg I cant stop laughing after reading one of the contest winners' opening sentence
This is a gold mine.
The 2021 winner in the Children's category:
>Despite an exhaustive search, rescuers were unable to locate young Christopher Robin in the Hundred Acre Wood before hypothermia took him, and the animals he once called friends descended upon his corpse like a silly old bear upon a pot of hunny.
>Paul Kollas, Orlando, FL
That would be a Florida Man novel . Most excellent.
Only if it included the term "bath salts."
i bet hunny is a florida slang term for bath salts
Now this is fucking funny! Bulwer Litton was ironic. These prize winners have to be really good to be that bad.
2010 Grand Prize Winner:
For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil.
When I woke up today, I didn’t think there was a chance in hell that I’d encounter the term “world’s thirstiest gerbil” but there it is.
A fine example of Vogon poetry.
Well… that was upsetting.
Aww don't be sad, you can be someone's waterbottle one day.....or be the gerbil....um...just take heart, okay? Something will happen at somepoint, sometime.
″The countdown stalled at T-Minus 69 seconds when Desiree, the first female ape to go up into space, winked at me slyly and pouted her thick, rubbery lips unmistakeably - the first of many such advances during what would prove to be the longest, and most memorable, space voyage of my career,″
I love the one about the guy who saved his own life by using his skills as a mimic to induce the firing squad to shoot themselves
Thats an opening line?
It was only when the booming voice of the Sergeant-at-Arms rang out declaiming the surprising order for each and every member of the firing squad to shoot the Sergeant-at-Arms himself and then turn their rifles on each other, an order assiduously followed by the well-trained soldiers, that the cigarette-smoking, blindfolded Gerry Corker truly appreciated the seemingly endless hours his mother had denied him on the baseball field during his lonely childhood, instead sending him every afternoon to Crazy Barney’s School of Mimicry and Ventriloquism.
John Shafer, Tonbridge, Kent, UK
Comin' out the gates swingin'
That's the most intriguing thing I've ever read
I could probably submit something worth the read.
John looked down at his undesirable toast, cooked unevenly on the upper right corner, enough to trigger a looming sense of irritation stemming from the service workers inherent lack of pride in their presentation, as he wondered to himself whether or not the butter had successfully penetrated that specific piece of his crispy warm bread. It had not, but John was too lacking in courage, or spineless, as some would say, to bring attention to his utter disappointment in his toast, so he chose to eat it as-is, while wondering what a life of courage and assertiveness would be like. These were the type of questions that led John down a very dangerous path.
Love it! But it has to be a single sentence. If you use a semi-colon instead of the first period and a colon or dash instead of the second one, you've got it!
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Roses are red, violets are a flower, why does this nigga got boots on in the shower?
Cause he’s in a porn and people are weird about feet
Clean it up and then enter it. It made me laugh.
Sorry, but that is 3 sentences. Change the full stop to a semicolon and ditch the last, pithy, sentence
Which one?
Not only is the opening 'line' bad, but the book is essentially unreadable. It was written in the style of the time, which was a loose collection of several page long run-on sentences.
I read quite a few books from this era when I was in high school to try to expand my understanding of how the population perceived the world and how that affected common behaviors that have since gone to the wayside. You are absolutely right about the writing style. I was getting marked down for run-on sentences constantly on my assignments because the writing style rubbed off on me. To this day, I still have a habit of writing long, run-on sentences. That, or I overcorrect and end up with short and blunt sentences.
I suspect you've probably heard the Gary Provost quote before but I always think of it when i worry about sentence length. There's nothing wrong with long or short sentences. You just have to vary them. I think English teachers forget that sometimes.
Anyway, for anyone not familiar with the quote...
>This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
I suspect you've probably read Alexander Pope's similar lesson on writing :-) --
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense:
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar;
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.
Hear how Timotheus' varied lays surprise,
And bid alternate passions fall and rise!
Ah, the joy of English's iambic pentameter.
Or as I used to say when I taught English as a foreign language 'English sounds like Tum-tee-Tum-tee-Tum-tee-Tum.'
I've always hated that, for the five words he just says monotonous things, I get that its hyperbole, but it comes across as disingenuous
Same
I see what you did there. Whether intentional or not.
Thank you for your art.
We wore an onion on our belt and wrote several page long run-on sentences as was the style at the time.
"Gimme 5 bees for a quarter," you'd say
What is that because of the Kaiser?
As was the style at the time.
“I wrote a story that was only one sentence!”
“Oh like the classic ‘for sale: baby shoes, never worn’?”
“No it was about two hundred pages”
Dammit, Jim! I'm a doctor, not a copy editor.
My personal 6-word-story is "He knelt, she gasped, sprinters start."
How about “he knelt, she gasped, the cunnalingus classes had paid off”
The perfect gift for any occasion.
There’s also the Lyttle Lytton contest, where there’s the same prompt but a 25 word limit, which makes them funnier in my opinion. For example:
>Madison was a shy, awkward, inwardly beautiful teenaged girl just like you.
Or this:
>”Schlormp” went the knife as she plunged it into my heart, breaking it not only physically, but also emotionally, since I loved her.
They also have a found in the wild category, for other lines that would work for this but someone actually wrote somewhere:
> Her skin was pale, like a pale ale… but her hair was amber, like an amber ale.
"Jennifer stood there, quietly ovulating."
“Schlormp”
dying
I audibly chuckled reading that first one. It's real poetry after reading all the run-on sentences.
“Dawn crept slowly over the sparkling emerald expanse of the country club golf course, trying in vain to remember where she had dropped her car keys.”
Funniest shit ever. I check in every few months for the updates. I wish they would post every single entry sometimes...
The one about the woman doing some gardening reminiscing sexually seeing a “slug thrusting innocuously across the rhododendrons” about “planet Alderon and the alien who used to make love to [me]” is one of my favourite sentences in all of existence.
Every time I read I’m in pieces.
Even though Bulwer-Lytton was a good writer and Paul Clifford a good book. He's only seen as bad because of Peanuts: Snoopy used his opening line in what is presumably a bad novel.
I once submitted a line that got "nominated" but never featured. Hehe.
If you don’t mind sharing I’d love to hear it!
Let me check my email archives. But I'd love to caveat this by saying I write for a living and it's usually a lot better than what I'm about to share
Edit, my Lytton entry:
Warm, moist, pleased, Amaryllis snuggled further into the reaches of her bedding, spreading her legs uninhibitedly—muscle memory from when she used to welcome her lovers—she added her hands to the movement and the wetness woke her.
The problem here is that Amaryllis actually sounds like an interesting character. Terrible name though, nice work :)
I shudder to think that it came out of me since I hate that m word so much. Amaryllis is truly not a cool name. It's the worst I could think of at the time.
I shudder to think that it came out of me since I hate that m word so much. Amaryllis is truly not a cool name. It's the worst I could think of at the time.
It was a Dork and Stormy Daniels night…
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One of my favorite things, look forward to every year! Some really impressive awful stuff
The best.
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