SON OF IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT
"It was a dark and stormy night….."
It’s possibly the most famous opening sentence in literary history, right up there with "Call me Ishmael" and "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times". Those of us who remember the comic strip "Peanuts" back in the years when it was actually funny recognize it as the opening sentence of Snoopy’s perpetually unfinished novel.
Few people, however, realize that this is actually the opening sentence of an actual novel by an English author named Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel ``Paul Clifford'' begins with the sentence ``It was a dark and stormy night ...'' and then wanders off into a rambling description of that night that is a mind-boggling sample of Victorian prose at its most purple.
That sentence provided the inspiration for a California English Lit. professor named Scott Rice, who in 1982 founded the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Unlike the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award, the Bulwer-Lytton contest, with tongue firmly in cheek, celebrates and encourages writing that is deliberately and hilariously bad-sort of the literary equivalent of the "Charlie’s Angels" movie. To quote the contest website (http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/) the contest "challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence of "the worst of all possible novels." The contest, with a prize the founder modestly describes as a "mere pittance", drew almost instant fame—or is it notoriety? —and has spawned a number of collections with the inevitable titles "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night", ‘Son of It Was a Dark and Stormy Night," etc.
This year’s prize went to a Canadian legal secretary named Sera Kirk who, as a legal secretary, has probably seen more bad writing than the poor junior editors who end up reading the unsolicited manuscript submissions at Harlequin Romances. Her prize winning entry:
``A small assortment of astonishingly loud brass instruments raced each other lustily to the respective ends of their distinct musical choices as the gates flew open to release a torrent of tawny fur comprised of angry yapping bullets that nipped at Desdemona's ankles, causing her to reflect once again (as blood filled her sneakers and she fought her way through the panicking crowd) that the annual Running of the Pomeranians in Liechtenstein was a stupid idea.''
The second-place entry, from Julie Stangeland of Seal Beach, Calif., is almost as bad:
``The lone monarch butterfly flew flutteringly through the cemetery, dancing on and glancing against headstone after headstone before alighting atop Willie Mitchell's already lowered casket, causing gasps of awe to fly from the open mouths of five or six lingering mourners, until a big shovelful of dirt landed on it and it died.''
Now, you might ask, with so much bad writing already being inflicted on the world, why would anyone want to encourage more of it? The short answer: it’s fun. For example, it’s tremendously liberating to short out your frontal lobes and let your mind create sentences like:
"The ocean waves lapped greedily around George’s pants legs like starving kittens at a bowl of milk, causing him to muse that, while Omaha, Nebraska had certainly benefited by its transformation into a seaside resort, it might just be that Mr. Cheney had been wrong when he said that there was nothing to all this global warming malarkey."
Or try this: "As he sat handcuffed to the chair in the police interrogation room, Gary ruefully cast his mind back to happier days, days when he had come to town with a heart chock full o’dreams: the dream of serving his country; the dream of making his world a better place in which to live; but most of all the dream of following in the footsteps of Presidents and hooking up with rich Jewish girls from California."
So on those dark and stormy nights, when you feel the urge to curl up with a good book, you might consider, just for once, curling up with a bad one. It’s not something I’d recommend as a regular diet, mind you, but once in a while, it’s good for a laugh.
Dusty Rhoades lives in Carthage, practices law in Aberdeen, and requests that if any readers submit examples of his own prose to this or any other bad-writing contest, that they at least spell his name right.
OUR GRACIOUS HOST (BOOKS-N-BYTES)
COPYRIGHT 2001 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.