It was a dark and stormy night

The famous opening line that inspired a writing competition

It was a dark and stormy night, typed Snoopy (image from Literary Hub)

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

This is the opening sentence from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel, Paul Clifford. It’s become the poster-child of bad story starters – although, according to Literary Hub, the phrase ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ was around long before Bulwer-Lytton turned it into his novel opener.

It also inspired a fiction contest with a difference. Since 1982, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has challenged people to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written.

I’ve entered the contest a couple of times but have yet to win (or even be a runner up). So there’s a conundrum: were my entries so bad they wouldn’t even pass muster in this tongue-in-cheek comp? Or were they actually too good to win? Here’s a sentence I submitted a few years back – I’ll let you decide!

The moon was rising like a round ball of sourdough that had been left on a windowsill to swell — not a south-facing windowsill because you don’t want it to rise too quickly only to flop the moment you retrieve the dough from the bowl, but an east-facing windowsill, the direction from which the moon nearly always rises.