Blatantly stolen from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
Here is the canonical ancient example, also the first usage of a classic cliché:
And here are some past winners, to prime the pump:
Also blatantly stolen from the Lyttle Lytton Contest.
And a couple of outright cheats:
(Scroll down to find them.)
So, what is the best Dopers can do?
Todd was sure it was going to be a bad day - he’d already woken up dead, in any case.
–
Ken was always a do it yourself kind of fellow (that was, though this has little bearing on anything, why nobody would shake his hand without asking if he had had a ‘hot date’ recently), but he was soon to learn the dangers of DIY surgery.
The Sea was angry that night, my friend, but he didn’t know it as he slipped silently through the desert sands towards that nubile camel, tethered and helpless to resist his lustful urges, like a virgin sacrifice to a forgotten god in a place forgotten long ago by mortal men, when the lands were fresh and unspoiled by generations of exploitation by the evil drones of the faceless companies enslaved by commerce to toil forever for the benefit of unseen masters.
I was born an orphan; my father died two years before I was born and then my mother, a year later.
Derleth the thread killer flexed his Mighty Keyboard Rex, spat into the desk drawer next to his monitor, which he used as a spittoon; the drawer, that is. not the monitor, which was a beautiful 21" NEC LCD widescreen that Derleth had claimed as a trophy after vanquishing a minor yet wealthy troll whose name would never again besmirch Derlth’s lips, or his Mighty Keyboard Rex’s keys for that matter, several of which were getting a little sticky from spittoon backsplash, so much so that Derleth began to consider a splashguard on Rex’s left edge to save the liitle remaining functionality of the CAPS LOCK key, as Derleth could not imagine thread killing without LOTS OF CAPITALIZATION, but he brushed the thought aside in his mad dash toward venting his righteous anger at that BITCH Mother Teresa, whom Derleth considered a major league ATTENTION WHORE even in death; and thus began sliding down that slippery slope the resy of us call Alzheimer’s disease, and began to type the most incoherent flame ever seen on the Web since the days of Cecil the Almost All Knowing.
My first (and last) attempt at writing a great fantasy novel began thus -
“As the full moon slowly set over the dark, still mountains, the valley below echoed with a resounding belch.”
There were several times in his life that Reginald regretted having a prosthetic, female rhino-butt surgically attached to his head, and this would be one of them.
The night was moist…
“The President stared at the button and wondered what chain of events had led to this moment.”
Well, heck, I once started a short story with “At that moment, Commander Tsala decided she liked the smell of burnt flesh.”
It was hot. And Dark. And humid…but mostly dark, with a little sticky thrown in for good measure. It was a night deodorant manufacturers dreamed of.
Only, it wasn’t night. It was underground. And underground it wouldn’t stay for long.
There was one list in Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans (a compilation of fiction from McSweeney’s) titled “Opening Lines to Stories I Will Never Write.” They were all fantastic, but the one I remember best is:
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!” he thought.
I have it packed away, or else I would give the author due credit.
That’d hook me, unless it was a love story… No, *especially *if it was a love story.
I’m going to take a walk, it’s too goddamn sultry in here.
“I’m going to take a walk,” he said. “It’s too goddam sultry in here.” And then her friend walked in and there were two sultries in there. So he turned around and decided to sweat it out.
Star Trek fanfic, actually, involving Romulans and Saavik and Barclay and Ro.
Anyhoo, how does this grab you: “The first splash of moisture this particular stretch of the dessert felt in months was a slightly-furred ball of spit splashing on the sand, expectorated by Achmed from atop his camel, waiting calmly as he did every tenth day for the British colonel to arrive for his dates.”
Alas, the first sentence of Atlanta Nights is “Pain.” Good foreshadowing, but not uniquely bad.
She put down her lipstick-stained coffee cup and looked meditatively into the distance, tapping a pencil against her teeth. The chief walked in just as she was about to fill in 43-down on the crossword puzzle. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to go. Miss Rochester’s just been stabbed with a staple remover.”
Boyo Jim: That was beautiful. I cracked up.
“It was for the best ‘Crazy’ Eddie never finished medical school: The world isn’t ready for a gynecologist who believes all lips need Carmex.”
“Jeb could accept a talking ass as one of God’s miracles, but an ass that spoke in blank iambic pentameter after a five-bean salad had gone just a few feet too far.”
“As I slowly loped to the ER, chagrin and a strange sense of pride overwhelmed the pain: He really had broken his foot off in my ass.”
“I was impaled upon the Dildo of Despair; and not in a good way either.”
I see to recall this won the contest one year:
“The white gravel of the driveway crunched under my feet like a carpet of broken knuckles.”
So what are the rules? Can it only be one sentence?
“My mother always looks so sexy when she first awakes in the morning, reminding me of a girlfriend I had in college who, in turn, reminded me of my mother at the time.”