This Year’s Bulwer-Lytton Worst First Sentence Winner
Posted by John Brownlee
Gerald began — but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them ‘permanently’ meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash — to pee.
I can think of several less interesting opening sentences that grace the first page of many New York Times Bestsellers. In fact, as far as getting me interested in reading more, that first sentence is a real winner.
But the Bulwer-Lytton Award has always been pretty silly. “It was a dark and stormy night,” is a fine opening sentence: it never would have passed into cliche if it wasn’t.
Wis. man gets top prize for bad prose [Yahoo News] : Thanks Dad
Categories: Literature
Posted at 5:17 pm on July 31, 2007
3 Comments -
I quite agree–and, in fact, as I wrote here, Bulwer-Lytton doesn’t deserve the bad rap that the contest gives him. Quite the opposite.
Comment by Jess Nevins — July 31, 2007 @ 7:05 pm
Idiot’s dislike of Bulwer-Lytton enables me to have my choice of editions of Zanoni and A Strange Story whenever they appear. The brilliance of a man who names his novel “My Novel” cannot be questioned.
Comment by Pat — July 31, 2007 @ 11:58 pm
I’ve always wondered. How many books actually start “It was a dark and stormy night”? I’ve only ever encountered it once; it is the first sentence of Madeline L’Engel’s “A Wrinkle in Time”.
Also, I agree with the other posters; the sentence is a grammatical and stylistic nightmare, but it certainly makes me want to read the second sentence.
Comment by Benjamin Rooney — August 1, 2007 @ 5:21 am