Yeah, I’m not sure all the contributors so far quite grasp the concept. Many of the opening lines so far are not bad at all. They may portend a bad BOOK but that is not the same thing.
There was another line in the article I read on the contest that sounded like all the worst elements of a Tom Clancy novel. It went something like “Mack A’Sassin leapt from the door of the Bell 241 double-rotor helicopter, knowing his Ruger 224 9mm automatic and its 15-round magazine was safety tucket into his Tilley utility belt, and landed atop the speeding Mercedes Z3 with a 5-speed manual transmission, 345 horsepower engine, and 17-inch Pirelli tires.” It was hilariously brutal and yet so true to the Clancy genre.
You could do the same for most genre works. Like this:
Now THAT is a really terrible opening line, because it has the three key elements of a really terrible opening line:
It’s horribly, horribly written,
As badly written as it is you could almost believe this line ppearing in a fantasy novel and
It encompasses all the worst cliches of fantasy novels:
Names with apostrophes in them
The heroine is a lost heir to a kingdom
There’s a dragon
Cute pseudo-Renassaire-Faire-misspellings like “magick”
The gun’s report so close to Mike’s ear resulted in a permanent 10% hearing loss, but since it was the second time Mike had the misfortune of being so close to a discharging pistol, and both times resulted in a permanent 10% hearing loss, the grand total hearing loss Mike had received from the guns discharging so close to his ear was 19% (10% hearing loss the first time, resulting in 90% hearing, and 10% percent of the new sum total of his hearing amounting to 9% of the original total.
And this was when Margarethe knew that her well-beloved nurse, aged face twinkling beneath her starched white cap, had been right all along when she pronounced, in tremulous tones, “If you can’t be bothered to wash your own knickers, my dear, you must be prepared to face the consequences.”
But that actually isn’t a bad opening line. It’s hilarious; it makes me think the rest of the book might be funny, like something Dave Barry would write. It’s shorter than the REALLY bad opening lines, and it’s well written. It’s bad in a way, but it seems too deliberately bad.
It was the 1980s that had been his golden age and Seymour had been trying to recapture that time through Viagra, hair implants and dance lessons, but no pharmacist, dermatologist or Arthur Murray instructor had been able to deter the middle-aged man that now steadily appeared in the bathroom mirror, however sufficiently determined.
It was the worst of times, it was the best times … wait, it was actually really neither, but there certainly were a lot of drama queens around back then.
Although he had been told time and again that there was nothing to be found in the East River, the hook on Ben’s fishing line proved otherwise, having managed to retrieve, over the course of the last week, an entire clothing ensemble, portions of which were still being modeled by the remains of their former owners.
Although some things are better left unsaid, Ben thought it prudent, having watched the bullet rip clear through his loins, to say “Ow.”
The knife slid across with fluid ease in one sweet motion, a sticky redness slowly spreading across the surface, dripping on to the floor, as Randall made certain to cover every inch of peanut butter.
All my life people told me "sit up straight! and “watch the speed limit” and “don’t end sentences with prepositions” but today’s the day I stand up… um, for myself and strike back… um, against the rules.
I hate to be a thread killer for this, but way up in the OP is a link with an email address to send in entries directly to the contest, as many entries as you want, by email. BUT, they must be previously unpublished, which presumably includes on the SDMB. So I will be sending future entries straight to the judges, as I seem to write badly rather well.