Bad First Lines

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Martha, we were talking about great opening lines for novels, right?

It’s well-written, beautiful language. It catches you, makes you want to read the rest of the book, right?

Right, right.

Well, of course, there’s a whole market for making bad opening lines for novels. Fake stuff, right?

Yeah.

Like the Bulwar Litton Fiction Contest.

Oh, right. It was a dark and stormy night.

So you’re parodying a really bad writer.

Well, I found this wonderful list. It’s compiled from a variety of sources.

It’s on the website called keepersoflist.org.

And whoever put this together, somebody named Glen O.

Has got 109 of these, and they’re wonderfully terrible in that awful way, right?

Car crashes on paper.

Number one with the most votes is,

She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

That’s terrible.

Why can’t you just say two legs, right?

That’s terrible.

And I’m pretty sure these are fake, but if they were real, how awesome would that be?

Oh, my gosh.

Here’s one for us.

At number 11, her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

Anyway.

And then this one, which maybe takes a second to get, but remember, this is a bad opening line for a novel.

You still have 873 pages to go.

Oh, my gosh.

That’s terrible.

At which point you would close the book, right?

Oh, those are painful.

I hope they’re made up.

I think so.

Some of these come from the Washington Post Style Invitational, where people have these competitions.

Some of these are from the 1999 style invitational.

Right.

What’s the worst opening line you ever heard?

We’re talking about books here.

The number is 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.