I was reading a book this afternoon that has some pretty bad sentences. What are the worst examples you can find in actual published books?
Today’s entries, from the medieval mystery Hangman Blind, by Cassandra Clark:
“She had heard nothing above the raucous shrieking of the carrion, nor seen anything.”
“His body was not yet fixed in the rigour of death and she was able to prise his fingers apart one by one. Giving up what had been grasped so fiercely at the moment of death, his fingers softly opened.”
“Suddenly the woods were bristling with the sound of falling water.”
While these are all terrible (logically, if not otherwise), I think they can be topped. Whatcha got?
You’ll find many outstanding examples at the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest website. Notable among them is the winner of the 2007 contest, by our own Boyo Jim:
I wanted it limited to things that were actually part of something published, presumably as a legitimate attempt at good writing, rather than a deliberate attempt at lousy writing.
Like shooting fish in a barrel, or rather like discharging Mauser catridges from a Karabiner 98k at Oncorhynchus mykiss in a Bordeaux-type Quercus alba, but Dan Brown. All of Dan Brown. From the ridiculous overuse of worthless detail, to shit like this, which is something like the 5th sentence of The DaVinci Code:
I don’t know about you, but I’m not generally able to collect that much visible detail from a person’s shadow.
I am afraid I have nothing to add but a question. Could you say what makes it a bad sentence?
In Morbo’s case, I can see that “mountainous silhouette” would be a little tired and saying that he’s “broad and tall” after having said that he’s mountainous is redundant. Also, yes, talking about a silhouette and then giving the color of the pupils is going from very general to very specific quite quickly.
The main issue there is forgetting the POV (point of view). If all the POV character sees is a silhouette, then he doesn’t know that the skin is pale or that the irises are pink. Also, you’d have to look very closely at someone’s eyes to distinguish dark red pupils from black pupils.
Other issues include:
Silhouettes don’t stare. People stare.
As you pointed out, if the word “mountainous” is used in one sentence, then using “broad and tall” in the following sentence to describe the same character is superfluous.
“His irises were pink with dark red pupils” makes it sound like irises have pupils. They don’t. More correctly, he could have said, “His eyes had pink irises and dark red pupils.”
“Ghostpale”? Really? How about “ghostly” or “pale”?
I’m not jsgoddess and I’m definitely not a reader with great taste but for starters, if your carrion is shrieking, it’s not carrion. Carrion is rotting animal.
Prising implies effort. If she had to prise his fingers open, they can’t also have fallen softly open.
There are many words I would use to describe the sound of falling water. Tinkling, chirping, roaring, rushing are all possibilities. Bristling is not one of them. Bristling means the hairs on the skin are standing upright. It’s almost soundless but implies fear, anxiety or anger, none of which are qualities water is usually assumed to possess.
I see that the horrid Legend of the Five Rings storyline novelization, Wind of War, foolishly has its preview on Amazon include the opening page. Which has these sentences trying to set the setting:
“Trees to the north, east, and south defined the square edges of the farmers’ land, and the neat rows of dead, defrosting vegetation looked like poorly groomed tufts of hair in between long furrows of dark brown water. Moving across the field was like walking across a soft, wet head.”
It doesn’t get better thereafter. In fact, it gets worse, as any reader with a passing familiarity with samurai drama – such as, one who would be reading a novelization of a samurai-themed RPG – will immediately recognize that the plot and characters were lifted wholesale from a Kurosawa film. But with that writing.
I have mentioned before that Jane Austen is not immune from crappy, incomprehensible sentences.
And for reference, here is the full first sentence of Paul Clifford, by Bulwer-Lytton. If he had just eschewed the semicolon in favor of a period, he probably wouldn’t be remembered as the worst opening-sentence writer in the Western world:
I’ve only read the comic book adaptation (yes, really) but the part that stood out for me was when he described murdering a woman before she could wish something bad would happen to the man who just beat her baby to death on a rock as “merciful”. Not because it was poorly written, but because of the horrible insight into the author’s character.
I have read all five of the Deerslayer books…largely because of Mark Twain’s magnificent roasting. And, yeah, they’re awful. Twain was right.
I know it isn’t quite the same thing, but Amazon recently offered a free book on the history of scientific errors and blunders – which was computer-translated from Italian to English. Not human-translated. Computer translated. You can guess at some of the grammatical howlers that produced.
One of my favorites: “‘You rat!’ he hissed.”
Several people have wondered about the Sherlock Homes story in which Watson mentions that “…my companion munched silently at his toast.” Everybody clearly understands what’s being described…but…isn’t there a contradiction there?
A nonfiction example: I remember in college reading a book on postmodernist thought, and there was a chapter on architecture that was impenetrable. One building was mentioned “whose putative volume was ocularly quite undecidable.” I read that sentence (the quote is from a much longer sentence) three or four times before I figured out he was saying you couldn’t figure out its size by looking at it. I was outraged.