Worst Opening Sentences of 2022
bulwer-lytton.com
bulwer-lytton.com
Brilliant.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Langua...
Hard to keep track of the parentheses though as the text disappears after 3-4 lines.
I was also experimenting briefly with a graph-based text editor where o could keep my tangents in check but still have some overall structure.
> If I wanted to fulfill my lifelong dream of being a dystopian YA’s protagonist, I needed several things: missing or deceased parents (check), a complicated romantic life involving multiple partners and predictable behavior (check), a tough exterior that protected my sensitive inner workings (check), and finally, a life of danger, uncertainty, and constant struggle to survive (check); it turns out, turtles are well-equipped to star in YA adventures!
This is brilliant!
So good
"That's it," she wailed, "I'm doomed to a life of misery and despair without my dear Harold and a decent sandwich to keep me going."
Honestly i think the 2019 grand winner is the best still
>2019 Grand Prize
>Space Fleet Commander Brad Brad sat in silence, surrounded by a slowly dissipating cloud of smoke, maintaining the same forlorn frown that had been fixed upon his face since he’d accidentally destroyed the phenomenon known as time, thirteen inches ago.
The structure is clunky, but the payoff at the end is actually really good! Also the dumbness of the name is funny enough to work in the right context. With a little bit of editing this would make a great piece of flash sci-fi on something like nanoism.
> Sir Reginald Brimwater, Guardian of the Tome of Remembrance, Herald of the Immortal Word, Voice of the Histories Both Recent and Ancient, Archivist of the Eternal Ledger, and Memory of the Empire had forgotten his quill, but he was pretty sure he got the gist of what what’s-his-face was saying.
(From the actual 2022 page: https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2022.)
Pretty good. :) These remind me of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams in style. I wish I knew more hilarious writers. Vonnegut is great though maybe not quite as hilarious. I've tried to read The Innocents Abroad and Confederacy of Dunces but I found myself only trudging slowly through both. I'd love your suggestions!
> THE BEET IS THE MOST INTENSE of vegetables.
> The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
> Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.
> The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip...
> The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.
> The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.
> In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t——.
> Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole—and when you aren't sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.)
> An old Ukrainian proverb warns, "A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil."
> That is a risk we have to take.
Reading him is like eating mushrooms and strolling through the garden of eden.
It's definitely a step up in terms of reader effort, but I found it worth it. It doesn't compare well to Pratchett and Adams who are more like a writer's variant of the stand-up comedian (a lot of the entries in this contest feel stylistically close to their writing). A Confederacy of Dunces instead shines in its portrayal of the comically pitiful characters within it, with John Kennedy Toole succeeding in making the cringe-worthy protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly one of the most loathsome characters I have ever come across in a novel.
FWIW, my own favourite humorous sci-fi short is R.A. Lafferty's Been a Long Long Time which can be read online: https://www.gwern.net/docs/fiction/humor/1970-lafferty.pdf
Also, maybe "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" by G.K. Chesterton.
And of course most by P.G. Wodehouse.
> Realising that his symptoms indicated a virtually undetectable, fast acting neurotoxin, CIA coroner Quinn Abner frantically wrote up the details, lay on the floor and, as a professional courtesy, did his best to draw a chalk outline of himself.
> As they sprinted together down the echoing, looping ramp of the deserted Guggenheim Museum, closely pursued by three swarthy members of the resolutely vicious Cannelloni gang, square-jawed British Royal Marine art historian/world's deadliest sniper John Savage and his voluptuous young modern art critic/Navajo linguist Samantha Silver cursed architect/interior designer/writer/educator Frank Lloyd Wright for designing such a circuitous route out of the building.
is both horrifying and a thing of wonder .. context is everything.
It wouldn't be out of place in one of my all time favourite books [1].
[1] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.h...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/dont-make-fun-of-r...
(Seriously, every time GPT-3 produces prose that passes the skim read test, you need this guy to go through it and point out that this is the third time it's mentioned the protagonists' profession in the paragraph and silhouettes don't stare)
For more, see:
The opening sentence of (what would be) the worst novel is different to the worst opening sentence of a novel.
The Children's & Young Adult Literature Winner for 2022 [2] is actually a good opening sentence:
> Three bears arrived at their den to discover a yellow haired girl sleeping, and as she was neither too hot nor too cold, neither too soft nor too hard, but just right, they ate her.
Goldilocks
They ate his little girl... Now he's pissed.
Coming to a theater near you.
Plot twist: Was a frame job by the Big Bad Wolf.
As he entered the room within which so many a wild night of their sweltering love affair had been spent, the White Rabbit regarded her with benevolent eyes, her posture such that he suspected something was wrong, but before he could speak Alice unburied her face from her trembling hands and between her intense sobs he made out the words, "I'm late . . . I'm late."
Perfect. Simply perfect.
To anyone reading them and wondering why the funniest entries aren't necessarily the winners: Lyttle Lytton tends to prefer sentences that read like a bad first sentence of a serious novel, not a good first sentence of a comedic or otherwise intentionally-absurd novel. The latter sort often make the list to some degree, but rarely end up at or near the top.
This one in particular has some rare ones - someone has http://www.ac.
My all-time favorite was from 2018:
> The wizard’s beard was long, much like Gandalf’s in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, who was also a wizard.
It's perfect.
With the exception of the Sci-Fi category -- those all read like high school pornographic fan fic. Honestly, I'm pretty disappointed in the sci-fi category. Seems like low hanging fruit. Surely they could have done better!
"I consider it necessary today to speak again about the tragic events in Donbass and the key aspects of ensuring the security of Russia."
(https://theprint.in/world/full-text-of-vladimir-putins-speec...)
Edit: the books don't exist: 'Since 1982 the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest has challenged participants to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written. Our whimsical literary competition honors Sir Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel Paul Clifford begins with "It was a dark and stormy night."'
Netflix made a movie that is literally this exact plot.
The alternative is the much funnier Lyttle Lytton Contest: http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html
I wished for more context on more of these sentences (like what is the book about, and how old was the author writing this in earnest)
https://lithub.com/this-years-very-worst-opening-sentence-is...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_(play) I have a 1891 edition by Friedberg & Mode, Berlin, with only the German footnotes in fracture while the rest in a readable serif font.
Grand Prize winner? I would read that book in a heartbeat!
Response: > "As the sun set on the dusty plains, John pulled his sweat-drenched shirt away from his stick-thin frame and gazed longingly at the flickering neon sign of the only bar for miles, silently praying for a cold beer to quench his thirst and dull the pain of his troubled past."
Well...there's a quite a few nuggets of prose in Mindstar Rising that wouldn't be out of place in this list. Thankfully his writing improved quite a bit, and/or he employed better editors.
Incredisappointing.
"I see thou art sore perplexed. I'm sword of Bafld myself."
"Founded in 1982 at San Jose State University in California, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenges entrants to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels."
FYI, a typical page in a paperback novel contains 300-400 words: the preceding paragraph/sentence is 61 words long (per wc(1)).
So starting with a bang is mandatory, if you want to get paid to write for a living.
Welcome to the short attention span society!
What's weird about this is how I find Jane Austen's intros catch my attention, although they often have only tangential relation to the actual characters or plot of the book. The first chapter of Persuasion is about a vain, foolish, impoverished baronet whose primary comfort when he's down is to see his own name written in the massive tome of nobility. The main character is barely mentioned until the end of the chapter. But for some reason, I've always found it strangely engaging. Why do I care about this guy? But for some reason, I do -- at least, I'm hooked long enough to get to the actually interesting characters.
Maybe that explains two of my favourite opening lines that both include things blowing up:
"It was the day my grandmother exploded"
and
"The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason."
Starts kinda OK but pretentiousness creeps in towards the end.
Compare that to the best SF book I know to date, Pandem:
> On the twenty-ninth of February, on the strangest of the days marked on the calendar, David Hammer, an employee of a respected city newspaper, was returning home a little later than usual.
> It was a humid, almost spring evening. At Charing Cross Station, David boarded a train that was due to drop him off in East Croydon in half an hour. There was no one in the compartment for eight at that hour, except David and a guy of about eighteen, who, having fallen on the seat, immediately closed his eyes and gave himself to the power of music flowing from the flat box of the player into the black clips of headphones.
Unfortunately I don't think it was ever translated to English :)
"Katsuro moaned as a bulge formed beneath the material of his kimono, a bulge that Miyuki seized, kneaded, massaged, squashed and crushed. With the fondling, Katsuro’s penis and testicles became one single mound that rolled around beneath the grip of her hand. Miyuki felt as though she was manipulating a small monkey that was curling up its paws.”