Posted on 07/17/2004 9:09:20 AM PDT by Xenalyte
Since 1982, the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. The BLFC was the brainchild (or Rosemary's baby) of Professor Scott Rice, whose graduate school excavations unearthed the source of the line "It was a dark and stormy night." Sentenced to write a seminar paper on a minor Victorian novelist, he chose the man with the funny hyphenated name, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who was best known for perpetrating The Last Days of Pompeii, Eugene Aram, Rienzi, The Caxtons, The Coming Race, and--not least--Paul Clifford, whose famous opener has been plagiarized repeatedly by Snoopy.
(Excerpt) Read more at bulwer-lytton.com ...
"Edwards shook his head and snorted, 'John, you _know_ I hate it when you introduce me as My Little Pony!"
"With an elegant hand, she wistfully sketched unicorns and daises in the margins of her spiral notebook, evoking that angelic, child-like purity and goodness she so often exhibited. A well-thumbed paperback copy of Wuthering Heights resided in her purse. When she would pull it out at certain moments to read, I often wondered if she were a Katherine in a lonely desperate search for her Heathcliff."
I remember his name was Burke, like the sound of passing gas in the bathtub.
It was a dark and stormy night but Matt the meteorologist knew that the storm would be gone by the morning and that the sun would rise in the east.
You really have a knack for this ...
The candidate looked on sullenly -- nay, defiantely -- as reports of bouncelessness continued to be reported. "Why don't they like me?" he muttered in his native French. "Don't they know I was in Vietnam?"
"She clutched the Bronte to her chest, exhaling with a sigh--a tenor signifying the vast depth of beauty so visibly apparent in her soul, staring distantly into the geography of her fantasies. I detected the small hint of tears glistening in her eyes, expressing a longing for a place always beyond the tender grasp of her fingers."
"Like an angry wasp trapped in a bell jar, he was going nowhere-- fast."
She broke my heart, so I busted her jaw.
As the crowd of eager Democrats looked on, he flashed his toothy, yet brilliant smile, and gave his magnificent head of dark, luscious hair a demure shake. A woman in the audience gasped.
Did Snoopy ever get past that first line?!
Wasn't there a Charlie Brown cartoon in which Snoopy had just typed "It was a dark and stormy night" and Lucy said it lacked subtlety? So he typed, "It was a kind of dark and sort of stormy night" or something like this?
man, is today boring or what.
Mrs. Hazeltine: [reading her manuscript] "His guts oozed nice, like a melted malted. "
These highschool similes are some of the funniest things I've read in a long time.
I'm not sure, but I thought it went on a little more. Like this:
"It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! And a woman screamed...."
"It's not all fun and games," said the sad clown. "At least, not when the tigers are loose."
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