The good, the bad and the really bad

“It was a quiet day, the kind of quiet that makes a person’s ears feel like they are stuffed with old socks, when Sally stepped out of her squeaky deck door to check on her bird feeder, an old but serviceable metal bucket perched on a card table, and was surprised by a sparrow alighting on her stiff hair; colorless, tangled and arranged on the top of her head like the foam on top of an especially ambitious café latte; a bad omen, she thought, remembering what happened the last time hordes of birds invaded her neighborhood.”

Stop! Before you start spreading rumors about the demise of my writing, read on.
I missed entering the most well-known (only?) competition for bad writing, the annual Bulwer-Lytton fiction writing contest (www.bulwer-lytton.com), but I still wanted to try my hand at being the best of the worst.
The contest, begun in the ‘80s at San Jose State, is named for the author of the infamous novel that begins, “It was a dark and stormy night.”
Entrants are required to write an opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. This year’s winner, David McKenzie, was interviewed Tuesday on NPR, and said his sentence came to him “in a moment of bad inspiration.”
I can relate to that. But trying to write badly in a good way is a great exercise for the brain (and it’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to writing a novel).
Writers in this year’s contest were asked to keep their entries under about 60 words, but there was no way I could cut anything out of my opening sentence. I mean, what would you cut out?
It’s also fun and invigorating to read great opening lines. Here are just a few memorable ones:
- “When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.” Alice Seabold’s “The Almost Moon.”
- “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” George Orwell’s “1984.”
- “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Leo Tolstoy in “Anna Karenina.”
- “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” Jeffrey Eugenides in “Middlesex.”
- “Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.” Anne Tyler in “Back When We Were Grownups.”