Bulwer-Lytton
"It was a dark and stormy night", one of the most famous phrases in English literature. It's Snoopy's perennial opening line in the Peanuts comic strip when the beagle dons his "Writer" persona. Bulwer-Lytton is also a website subtitled Where WWW means 'Wretched Writers Welcome', home of an annual fiction contest for the worst opening sentence for a novel. Why you may wonder is the phrase considered so bad? For me the answer is a toss-up between use of the "to be" construction (there are, I am, here is) and telling rather than showing. When a sentence starts with a "to be" construction, it pitches readers headfirst into their minds instead of their senses. How about, "Velvety darkness smothered him, punctuated by nerve-jangling explosions of thunder and blinding lightning" -- dark and stormy with three sensory inputs: touch, hearing, and sight and feelings of jumpiness and suffocation.
posted by Georganna Hancock M.S. | 7:58 AM
2 Comments:
I am glad to hear that they're still having the Bulwer-Lytton contest. I have four paperback collections of "winners" from that contest: "It Was A Dark And Stormy Night" and its three sequels. They are collected in categories -- "Atrocious Puns," for example, or "Plain Brown Wrappers." I don't know if the books are still in print or not, but if they are I would highly recommend them.
Here's the first book:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140075569
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