Submitted by dylancatlow t3_1130u8q in todayilearned
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.
And there is now an annual Bulwer-Lytton award for worst opening line in a published work. Some of them are just eye-gougingly bad.
Oh internet stranger, you know I'm too lazy to read that article. Thanks!
I was too lazy to read that post. Two lines AND a second paragraph?!?!
Bulwer Lytton also coined the phrase 'the pen is mightier than the sword' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pen_is_mightier_than_the_sword
I’ll take the penis mightier for $500 Alex.
Or the entire opening sentence
tl;dr: thnx
It was a dark and stormy night, three men sat around a campfire, the first man said: it was a dark and stormy night, three men sat around a campfire..
That sounds lit as fuck.
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times . . .
YOU STUPID MONKEY!!!!
Shut up…
Thank you for my weekly reminder to watch this again.
It was a dark and stormy night, and the captain said to the first mate: “first mate, tell me a story”, and this is the story he said:
It was a dark and stormy night, and the captain said to the first mate: “first mate, tell me a story”, and this is the story he said:
It was a dark and stormy night…
The weather started getting rough, the tiny ship was tossed...
If it were not for the courage of the fearless crew...
The Minnow would be lost!
The chef began preparing tonight’s dinner: ship tossed salad
Once upon a time there was a Giant. The Giant squeezed Jack and said, "Tell me a better storey or I'll grind your bones to make my bread. And when your storey is finished, I'll grind your bones to make my bread anyway! HO, Ho, Ho!" The Giant laughed an ugly laugh. Jack thought, 'He'll kill me if I do, he'll kill me if I dont. There's only one way to get out of this.' Jack cleared his throat, and then began his story.
^(Once upon a time there was a Giant. The Giant squeezed Jack and said, "Tell me a better storey or I'll grind your bones to make my bread. And when your storey is finished, I'll grind your bones to make my bread anyway! HO, Ho, Ho!" The Giant laughed an ugly laugh. Jack thought, 'He'll kill me if I do, he'll kill me if I don't. There's only one way to get out of this.' Jack cleared his throat, and then began his story.)
^(Once upon a time...)
Ah yes, I too remember buying The Stinky Cheeseman at my school's book fair.
The variation I heard of that one says Jim instead of first mate. I like knowing that Jim was a first mate. Jim's good at his job.
Hey, I know Jim. He's a good dude.
My Dad used to tell me this one. His version was a bit more dramatic. It was a dark and stormy night, the wind blew and blew. The waves crashed against the boat, the mast creaked, the candle flickered and the captain said “aye mate, tell me a story” and the mate began. It was a dark and stormy night….
I never understood the problem. I have had bright stormy nights and dark stormy nights. It’s not redundant.
That clause isn't bad. It became famous for how bad the rest of the novel was, becoming a literary in-joke.
Bulwer-Lytton wrote incredibly long, convoluted sentences. His rambling metaphors often seem like he wrote himself into a corner for three paragraphs, then ended them abruptly. His stories are full of heavy-handed philosophy and on-the-nose comparisons. His prose is invariably grandiose.
Stuff like that.
Aw shucks. Seriously, thank you for the wonderful explanation!
Cheers, fellow Utah-based Redditor!
Today I learned Bulwer-Lytton is actually Cormac McCarthy
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>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 swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
It might just be me, but I genuinely like that opener.
Cliches don’t usually become cliches because they suck the first time around
I mean, it's just all over the place. It has a fucking parenthetical for no reason.
Well it has a parenthetical because its an aside and that's what parentheticals are for. Really it just reads like a typical 19th century sentence.
Writing was more ponderous back then
There's a reason this particular sentence has been remembered for its poor structure. I have read plenty of 19th century and earlier literature, being ponderous and long doesn't mean poorly structured or scattered.
This sounds like a really creative opener for a script. I can see each description being its own shot during the intro.
That's a very short novel
"Once upon a time there was a little sausage called Baldrick. And he lived happily ever after."
Why don't you sodof
It is a simple line that has become cliche.
Snoopy wrote that. What are you talking about??
Yeah!!!
(a dear friend of mine started his masters thesis with that line… I hope his professors appreciated it)
It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly a shot rang out.
Suddenly a shot...was heard?
A maid screamed!
Now I have that song stuck in my head. 😁
“Sometimes we writers take hours Finding exactly the right word It, it, it, it It was a dark and stormy morning Packed, flat, trite It was a dark and stormy evening It was a dark and stormy night Night, right!”
I prefer his novel “Toodle-oo Caribou: A Tale of the Frozen North.” Joe Eskimo is a classic, and that’s where I learned about Polar Cows.
I scrolled way too far to find this reference
This was the inspiration for "The Studdley Luckler Chonicles - Tales of the World's Greatest Defective. "It was dark. So dark you couldn't see your hand in front of your face."
A hilarious adventure story of a guy who stumbles into becoming a private detective and solving gunrunning, government overthrowing, Chinese opium dealer crimes. Sarcasm and irony abound.
The second novel- The Search for Big Ben involves locating a British spy for MI-6 who has run off to deep, dark Africa to locate a lost diamond mine and discovers a secret German base where "anti-gravitational flying devices" are being developed (diesel powered chunks of flying iron that burn fuel and smoke like trains)
Okay, that sentence is terrible. I've wondered because "It was a dark and stormy night" by itself is a good sentence to open with.
>The night was moist.
The night was moister than an oyster, and just as willing to open her inviting shell.
The night was sultry
I'm getting the hell outta here. Too goddamn sultry in here.
Owen loves his mama! Owen loves mama!
I'm gonna kill the bitch
Holy shit! What a dream I was having! Louis Armstrong was trying to kill me!
Do you say the night was humid? Or do you say the night was moist? That's writing.
If he cut out the middle and put:
"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, checked by violent gusts of wind which swept up the streets of London".....etc.
I feel that keeps the sentence more lean.
In the same way that "roses are red, violets are blue" is a good sentence to open a poem with, alright.
Now, wait, "It was a dark and stormy night" is the opening paragraph to A Wrinkle In Time, one of the best children's books ever!
Madeleine L'Engle used it as the opening line of 'A Wrinkle in Time".
This is from Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It is too bad that this seems to be mainly what he is remembered for.
He was a 19th-century English novelist, dandy, and politician. He was friends with and served with Benjamin Disraeli, another dandy/writer/ politician (and ultimately prime minister). EBL was colonial secretary . Pelham was a popular novel of his. Also The Last Days of Pompeii, among many, many others.
If I am not mistaken, ELB would get elected by explaining that under no circumstances should anyone ever vote for him.
It was a different time. I might be mixing him up with someone else on this point.
Anyway, he was an interesting and eccentric fellow.
His most impactful piece of writing is probably Vril, the Power of the Coming Race, a story about mystical beings who live inside the Earth. Theosophists such as Helena Blavatsky accepted this book as part of the secret occult truth of the world. Theosophists ideas about the “root races” such as the “Aryans” led to a lot of Nazi beliefs. So strange how a proto-science fiction book anonymously published in 1871 can help lead to one of the most brutal regimes in the history of the world.
"You just listen to listen to the ol' Porkchop Express and take his advice on a dark and stormy night alright. When some wild-eyed 8 foot tall maniac grabs your neck taps the back of your favorite head up against a bar room wall and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if you've paid your dues. You just stare that big sucker right back in the eye and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that. Have you paid your dues Jack? Yes sir the check is in the mail." ~ Jack Burton
Who?
Jack Burton. Me!
For some reason I always thought wrinkle in time was the first book
A Dark and Stormy is a cocktail with ginger beer, dark rum and lime wedge.
i like 'em served in copper mugs with what seems like too much ice 👍
I would ask my father to tell me a story and sometimes he would laugh and say... "It was a dark and stormy night, and the wind began to blow... and the Captain said 'Popeye tell us a story' and Popeye said " it was a dark and stormy night and the wind began to blow....." over and over and over and over.. until I begged him to stop.
It's a running Peanut's joke also. Everytime Snoopy starts writing with a typewriter on top of the doghouse, he starts out : "It was a dark and stormy night....."
""The night was....moist?"
The night was sultry.
'" I asked for the salted nuts, he got me the unsalted nuts. The unsalted nuts makes me SHHHCHOKE! "
>...which blew my fancy little nips off the tips of my tits and did there make me spontaneously explode at my loins with an ejaculate so frothy it would cause the ocean's waves to turn green with envy.
I think I can sill remember Snoopy's version: It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a door slammed. The maid screamed. A pirate ship appeared on the horizon."
While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.
Thanks to OP, I now know that the novel didn’t end after the opening phrase.
The interest point about it is, that the first to use the phrase did not end the sentence where people do today. Which gives it a somewhat different meaning.
I mean, it's a semicolon, so you could fairly easily replace that with a period and have the rest of the sentence play out.
And I'm not sure what you mean by giving it a different meaning. The rest of the sentence just further describes the storminess (and darkness) of the night.
Semicolons aren't interchangeable with periods, otherwise we wouldn't bother with them. What they accomplish often could be easily inferred from the context anyway, but ambiguity of that sort can be jarring and unpoetic. If what followed the semicolon was not equally terrible, the sentence might have been salvageable.
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The reason it became famous is because the opening sentence is a famous example of purple prose.
Raymond Chandler
It's a Raymond Chandler evening
At the end of someone's day
And I'm standing in my pocket
And I'm slowly turning grey
I remember what I told you
But I can't remember why
And the yellow leaves are falling
In a spiral from the sky
There's a body on the railings
That I can't identify
And I'd like to reassure you
But I'm not that kind of guy
It's a Raymond Chandler evening
And the pavements are all wet
And I'm lurking in the shadows
Because it hasn't happened...
...yet.
~Robyn Hitchcock
I couldn't help but read this to the tune of "The Windmills of your Mind"
OMG. Thank you so much for this. I didn’t realize I still had it memorized until I saw the title. Bringing back so many good memories.🤔
Where did you first learn the poem?
Back in the mid 90s I got really into The Crow and poetry and I remember this poem was in the graphic novel comic book of The Crow and it hit like a ton of bricks.
The Crow. I was easily stuck on that page for 15 to 20 minutes the first time. 🧐 I think I might go dig out my copy of The Crow right now.☺️
The sea was angry that day my friends. Like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.
It's also the first line to A Wrinkle in Time. Obviously much later.
Yeah, a lot of books from the 19th century weren’t known for their brevity.
I read the Brontë sisters: Anne, charlotte Emily and .Shaniqua. The last known Brontë sister wrote about urban issues of the time.
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No wonder Snoopy stoped there. That’s a long intro.
He didn’t stop there: https://tenthousandplaces.org/2014/08/06/1330/
It might be terrible, but there's not many people on this thread that will ever writing anything half so enduring.
Awful ≠ Forgettable
It's also the start of "A Wrinkle in Time "
Made famous by Snoopy via Charles Schulz.
Snoopy.
That line from the Five Iron Frenzy song makes more sense to me now
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I figure alot of things start with that. It's a very basic description
Sure, but all subsequent usages of this phrase are plays on the original, since it's so well known by now that no writer says it without having heard it first.
It was a dark and stormy night The toilet light was dim There was a crash and then a splash Oh no he’s fallen in
Aren't all nights dark?
Not if you approach the polar circle during the summer.
It also opens A Wrinkle in Time
“Well, I love a rainy night.” -Eddie Rabbitt
Frankenstein?
The opening is famous because the book is legendarily terrible by the way
Reminds me of when artistic simplification was illegal in Ankh-Morpork
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"It was a cold and snowy day"
Mountains balais, Ustio
All I can think of when I hear this opener is Snoopy toiling over his typewriter trying to begin his novel in a profound way.
"It was a clear black night, a clear white moon"
I’m fairly certain it’s also how “A wrinkle in time” begins.
It was a dark and stormy night. Lightning crashes and a new mother cries. Her placenta falls to the floor. The angel opens her eyes The confusion sets on before the doctor can even close the door. An old mother dies; her intentions fall to the floor. The angel closes her eyes. The confusion that was hers belongs now, to the baby down the hall.
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Good old Eddie Lytton
I think what makes it such an iconic sentence is that it's so perfectly lacking in originality that all share equally in the embarrassment that if not for its author, those words might have been theirs. All that separates him from the rest of us is that when creativity was refusing to make an appearance at the desired moment, he wanted the world to know it too.
Is anyone else bothered by the use of both a semicolon and an em dash in this sentence, or is it just me?
The two can be used interchangeably to a degree, but an em-dash more effectively serves as an interjection into a sentence. Usually that interjection is sandwiched between two parts of the sentence, but it doesn't have to be.
Everything about the sentence is bothersome. It's a legendarily badly written sentence.
👎
Some0neAwesome t1_j8n9a5g wrote
"It's the opening line to Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel, 'Paul Clifford', about a highway robber during the French Revolution."
For those who are too lazy to read the article.