TERRIBLE FIRST SENTENCES
G'day guys,
I recall exactly what I did in the first class I ever conducted for the University of The Third Age. I took five books of famous authors and read the very first sentence of each to my students. The purpose was to highlight the need to capture the reader from the outset.Today I feature some of the worst first sentences in literature history, courtesy of Nico Lang.
"Every year, the announcement
of Bulwer-Lytton Prize is a gift from bad writing heaven. Inspired by novelist
and playwright Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s famous “it was a dark and stormy
night” opener, the contest asks writers to submit an opening sentence for the
“worst of all possible novels” — although Fifty
Shades of Grey has already been written. The results are
perennially astounding, with entries in every genre from Children’s Literature
to Spy Novels, and one sentence awarded the dubious honor of the worst sentence
of the year. It’s like the Razzies, but better.
Here are some of the best
entries from the past decade of the contest, each of them just as wonderfully
atrocious as the next. Think you can write a sentence that’s worse?
1. Sue Fondrie
Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.
2. Ali Kawashima
As the
dark and mysterious stranger approached, Angela bit her lip anxiously, hoping
with every nerve, cell, and fiber of her being that this would be the one man
who would understand – who would take her away from all this – and who would
not just squeeze her boob and make a loud honking noise, as all the others had.
3. Chris Wieloch
She
strutted into my office wearing a dress that clung to her like Saran Wrap to a
sloppily butchered pork knuckle, bone and sinew jutting and lurching
asymmetrically beneath its folds, the tightness exaggerating the granularity of
the suet and causing what little palatable meat there was to sweat, its
transparency the thief of imagination.
4. Janine Beacham
The
fairies of Minglewood, which is near Dingly Pool, were having a grand revel
with flower-cakes, and butterfly dances, looking ever so pretty, while Queen
Bellaflora swept her wand o’er the waterfall’s foam, making it pop like the
snot-bubbles on your baby sister’s face.
5. Molly Ringle
For the
first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every
stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and
sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle
and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.
6. Jordan Kaderli
Betty had
eyes that said come here, lips that said kiss me, arms and torso that said hold
me all night long, but the rest of her body said, “Fillet me, cover me in
cornmeal, and fry me in peanut oil”; romance wasn’t easy for a mermaid.
7. Rephah Berg
On
reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been
rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll
gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you
can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push
it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.
8. Cathy Bryant
As he
told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the
infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles
to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single
follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the
soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.
9. David S. Nelson
The
Mushroom Men of Knarf were silently advancing on the unsuspecting earthlings,
and their thin milky blood ran colder when they smelled spores from fungal
toenail infections rising from many of the invaders’ feet, for to them it was a
wondrous and shocking scent of kinship, homeland, and asexual reproduction.
10. Tonya Lavel
It was
such a beautiful night; the bright moonlight illuminated the sky, the thick
clouds floated leisurely by just above the silhouette of tall, majestic trees,
and I was viewing it all from the front row seat of the bullet hole in my car
trunk.
11. David Pepper
As an
ornithologist, George was fascinated by the fact that urine and feces mix in
birds’ rectums to form a unified, homogeneous slurry that is expelled through
defecation, although eying Greta’s face, and sensing the reaction of the
congregation, he immediately realized he should have used a different analogy
to describe their relationship in his wedding vows.
12. Ron D. Smith
As the
sun dropped below the horizon, the safari guide confirmed the approaching cape
buffaloes were herbivores, which calmed everyone in the group, except for Herb,
of course.
13. Elizabeth Muenster
Sterben
counted calcium bars in the storage chamber, wondering why women back on Earth
paid him little attention, but up here they seem to adore him, in fact, six
fraichemaidens had already shown him their blinka.
14. Andrew Bowers
“Hmm …”
thought Abigail as she gazed languidly from the veranda past the bright white
patio to the cerulean sea beyond, where dolphins played and seagulls sang, where
splashing surf sounded like the tintinnabulation of a thousand tiny bells,
where great gray whales bellowed and the sunlight sparkled off the myriad of
sequins on the flyfish’s bow ties, “time to get my meds checked.”
15. Pamela Patchet
The
notion that they would no longer be a couple dashed Helen’s hopes and scrambled
her thoughts not unlike the time her sleeve caught the edge of the open egg
carton and the contents hit the floor like fragile things hitting cold tiles,
more pitiable because they were the expensive organic brown eggs from
free-range chickens, and one of them clearly had double yolks entwined in one
sac just the way Helen and Richard used to be.
16. David S. Nelson
He
swaggered into the room (in which he was now the “smartest guy”) with a certain
Wikipedic insouciance, and without skipping a beat made a beeline towards
Dorothy, busting right through her knot of admirers, and she threw her arms
around him and gave him a passionate though slightly tickly kiss, moaning
softly, “Oooohh, Scarecrow!”
17. Jeanne Villa
She
sipped her latte gracefully, unaware of the milk foam droplets building on her
mustache, which was not the peachy-fine baby fuzz that Nordic girls might have,
but a really dense, dark, hirsute lip-lining row of fur common to southern
Mediterranean ladies nearing menopause, and winked at the obviously charmed
Spaniard at the next table.
18. Jessica Sasishara
On their
first date he’d asked how much she thought Edgar Allan Poe’s toe nails would
sell for on eBay, and on their second he paid for subway fair with nickels he
fished out of a fountain, but he was otherwise charming and she thought that
they could have a perfectly tolerable life together.
19. Beth Fand Incollingo
Like a
mechanic who forgets to wipe his hands on a shop rag and then goes home, hugs
his wife, and gets a grease stain on her favorite sweater – love touches you,
and marks you forever.
20. Shannon Wedge
Leopold
looked up at the arrow piercing the skin of the dirigible with a sort of
wondrous dismay – the wheezy shriek was just the sort of sound he always
imagined a baby moose being beaten with a pair of accordions might make.
21. Charles Howland
The
professor looked down at his new young lover, who rested fitfully, lashed as
she was with duct tape to the side of his stolen hovercraft, her head lolling
gently in the breeze, and as they soared over the buildings of downtown St.
Paul to his secret lair he mused that she was much like a sweet ripe juicy
peach, except for her not being a fuzzy three-inch sphere produced by a tree
with pink blossoms and that she had internal organs and could talk.
22. Kathryn Minicozzi
As she
slowly drove up the long, winding driveway, Lady Alicia peeked out the window
of her shiny blue Mercedes and spied Rodrigo the new gardener standing on a
grassy mound with his long black hair flowing in the wind, his brown eyes
piercing into her very soul, and his white shirt open to the waist, revealing
his beautifully rippling muscular chest, and she thought to herself, “I must
tell that lazy idiot to trim the hedges by the gate.”
23. Jim Gleeson
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.
24. Dennis Barry
Despite
the vast differences it their ages, ethnicity, and religious upbringing, the
sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the most amazing he had ever
experienced; and for the entirety of the Labor Day weekend they had sex like
monkeys on espresso, not those monkeys in the zoo that fling their feces at
you, but more like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and
access to an espresso machine.
25. Randy Groom
Colin
grabbed the switchgear and slammed the spritely Vauxhall Vixen into a lower
gear as he screamed through the roundabout heading toward the familiar pink
rowhouse in Puking-On-The-Wold, his mind filled with the image of his comely
Olive, dressed in some lacy underthing, waiting on the couch with only a smile
and a cucumber sandwich, hoping that his lunch hour would provide sufficient
time for both a naughty little romp and a digestive biscuit.
26. Leslie Muir
He was a
dark and stormy knight, and this excited Gwendolyn, but admittedly not as much
as last night when he was Antonio Banderas in drag, or the night before that
when he was a French Legionnaire who blindfolded her and fed her pommes frites
from his kepi.
27. Linda Boatright
Corinne
considered the colors (palest green, gray and lavender) and texture (downy as
the finest velvet) and wondered, “How long have these cold cuts been in my
refrigerator?”
28. Emma DeZordi
Chain-smoking
as he stood in the amber glow of the street lamp, he gazed up at the brownstone
wherein resided Bunny Morgan, and thought how like a bunny Bunny was, though he
had read somewhere that rabbits were coprophages, which meant that they ate
their own feces, which was really disgusting now that he thought about it, and
nothing like Bunny, at least he hoped not, so on second thought Bunny wasn’t like
a bunny after all, but she still was pretty hot.
29. Dan Winters
Sex with
Rachel after she turned fifty was like driving the last-place team on the last
day of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race, the point no longer the ride but the finish,
the difficulty not the speed but keeping all the parts moving in the right
direction, not to mention all that irritating barking.
30. James Pokines
“Bring a
bottle of wine and wear something uncomplicated – I’m in no mood for a struggle
tonight,” rolled from Jean-Pierre’s lips like a bowling ball shooting up the
return ramp, only to slow itself abruptly at the top before ka-whonking! into
the balls already lined up there like all the lines she had heard before, and
Sylvia knew at last that all the good ones were not married, gay, or in Mexican
prisons.
31. Stephen Farnsworth
When Mr
Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his
eleventy-first birthday, his children packed his bags and drove him to Golden
Pastures retirement complex just off Interstate 95.
32. Howie McLennon
Before
they met, his heart was a frozen block of ice, scarred by the skate blades of
broken relationships, then she came along and like a beautiful Zamboni flooded
his heart with warmth, scraped away the ugly slushy bits, and dumped them in
the empty parking lot of his soul.
33. Mary E. Patrick
As I
gardened, gazing towards the autumnal sky, I longed to run my finger through
the trail of mucus left by a single speckled slug – innocuously thrusting past
my rhododendrons – and in feeling that warm slime, be swept back to planet
Alderon, back into the tentacles of the alien who loved me.
Clancy's comment: Thanks, Nico. Well? What do you think? If you want to read a great opening sentence, go and check out 'The Day of The Jackal'.
I'm ...
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