Topic: Funny: The the best BAD opening sentence for a novel.
I grabbed this from the old TNBW forums and had to share:
Here are this year's winners of the Bulwer-Lytton contest, (aka "It Was a dark and Stormy Night" Contest) run by the English Department
of San Jose State University, wherein one writes only the first line of a bad
novel.
The goal of this contest is to write the best BAD opening sentence for a novel.
Winners in reverse:
10. As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he were ever to break wind in the echo chamber, he would never hear the end of it.
9. Just beyond the Narrows , the river widens.
8. With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have envied, a tanned
unblemished oval face framed with lustrous thick brown hair, deep
azure-blue eyes fringed with long black lashes, perfect teeth that vied
for competition, and a small straight nose, Marilee had a beauty that
defied description.
7. Andre, a simple peasant, had only one thing on his mind as he crept along the East wall: "Andre creep... Andre
creep...Andre creep."
6. Stanislaus Smedley, a man always on the cutting edge of narcissism, was about to give his body and soul to a
back alley sex-change surgeon to become the woman he loved..
5. Although Sarah had an abnormal fear of mice, it did not keep her from
eking out a living at a local pet store.
4. Stanley looked quite bored and somewhat detached, but then penguins
often do.
3. Like an over-ripe beefsteak tomato rimmed with cottage cheese, the corpulent remains of Santa Claus lay dead on the
hotel floor.
2. Mike Hardware was the kind of private eye who didn't know the meaning of the word "fear"'; a man who could laugh in
the face of danger and spit in the eye of death -- in short, a moron
with suicidal tendencies.
AND THE WINNER IS...
1. The sun oozed over the horizon, shoved aside darkness, crept along the
greensward, and, with sickly fingers, pushed through the castle window,
revealing the pillaged princess, hand at throat, crown asunder, gaping
in frenzied horror at the sated, sodden amphibian lying beside her,
disbelieving the magnitude of the frog's deception, screaming madly,
"You lied!"
