Pages - Menu

Sunday, July 17, 2011

The WORST opener in the history of writing

This is my entry for the Absolute Write blog chain for July. This month's prompt: the Mini Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The Mini Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest means trying to write the worst possible first line of a book or story in the spirit of Edward "It was a dark and stormy night..." Bulwer-Lytton. "Worst" in this case is subjective, but florid and ridiculous purple prose is probably closest to the spirit of the thing. Here is mine:
 
It was an unusually well told dark and extremely out of the ordinary stormy, because thunder groaned in the abyss like a mad man, night, and by night the vultures cried yelps of pleas for the melancholy in the air had built up and just wouldn't vaporize.

Please visit all the awesome participants...Cheers!

orion_mk3 - http://nonexistentbooks.wordpress.com

AuburnAssassin - http://clairegillian.com
dolores haze - http://dianedooley.wordpress.com/
Horseflye - http://thecozylittleplot.blogspot.com/
Proach - http://www.deannaproach.com/
BigWords - http://bigwords88.wordpress.com/
jkellerford - http://jennykellerford.wordpress.com/
Ralph Pines - http://ralfast.wordpress.com/
Euclid - http://euclid-thoughts.blogspot.com/
Diana Rajchel - http://blog.dianarajchel.com/
pezie - http://www.erinbrambilla.wordpress.com/
Guardian - http://daewrites.blogspot.com/
egoodlett - http://wordlarceny.blogspot.com/
Alpha Echo - http://writersramblings81.blogspot.com/

P.S. Don't forget to scroll down and enter my HUGE blog giveaway! Loads of prizes that range from brand new books, to Amazon gift cards, to critiques. Cheers!

14 comments:

  1. I pity the poor vultures trapped in this sentence. Nice job.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks! It was tougher than I thought coming up with something bad...But then it was just random...hehehe.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yelping vultures? Someone please vaporize me. This is a truly awful opening line.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I missed the vultures on the first pass. Crikey that is one swarm of a storm-thingy! :D

    ReplyDelete
  5. What, you mean I shouldn't do this? :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. I love the first bit... "It was an unusually well told dark and extremely out of the ordinary storm" Absolutely hilarious.

    Though honestly, I've never understood why people think "It was a dark and stormy night" is a bad opening. It's totally effective for me, conjuring up a very vivid image.

    ReplyDelete
  7. LOL. unusually well-told. Nice ;) also "cried yelps of pleas" was perfectly convoluted and wordy! hehe

    ReplyDelete
  8. Interesting callback to the original at the beginning there, but I think the muddled syntax, which suggests that thunderstorms are caused by vultures, is the real gem.

    ReplyDelete
  9. All those commas. Classic. I laughed at "It was an unusually well told dark and extremely out of the ordinary stormy..."

    ReplyDelete
  10. Thanks guys! Really glad you liked it :D

    ReplyDelete
  11. Run on sentence...to much description. Despite that, I actually liked it.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Now THAT'S a Bulwer-Lytton sentence! Horrible, awful, overly florid...well done!

    ReplyDelete
  13. It's funny -- I posted about that contest today. And I have to say, your opener is just as bad as the woman's who won the contest this year. Nice job!

    ReplyDelete