Editing Mister D

Where to Start: Opening Your Story

You’ve been quite disciplined about your new story idea, laying out the whole plot, getting a good handle on your storyline and characters, and so you sit down to write.  The blank screen is your canvas, the keyboard your brush, and the world is full to bursting with possibilities.  Getting started is half the battle, you tell yourself, and you hunker down to write that smashing first sentence, which will flow naturally into your sparkling first paragraph, setting the stage for your compelling first chapter.  After a few false starts, you begin to type:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

You may recognize this unfortunate sentence as the quintessentially bad opening sentence of the novel Paul Clifford.  It was written by Victorian Era writer George Edward Bulwer-Lytton, namesake of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/), an annual celebration of bad writing.  This tongue-in-cheek literary competition “challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels” in homage to Bulwer-Lytton’s regrettable legacy of purple prose.

So, what’s so bad about this sentence?  How do I count the ways?

For starters, I should mention that the worst thing about this sentence is that it is part of Paul Clifford, a novel which is universally recognized as awful.  But the sentence itself has some appeal, doesn’t it?  It’s descriptive, certainly.  It “sets the mood.”  It’s earnest, literate, and evocative.  Be honest, you think it might be better than your own writing, don’t you?

The flaws in this sentence are many, but perhaps the most egregious is that it relies on a weather report to set the stage for the story which, as it happens, has precious little to do with the weather.  And for all the florid prose, Bulwer-Lytton has used fifty-eight words, three commas, one semicolon, one dash, and one parenthetical remark to tell us the story is set in London and the weather is frightful.  Modern writers might be forgiven for such a misstep since it mirrors a typical opening scene in, say, a horror film, but Bulwer-Lytton wrote this line in 1830, long before cinema began to poison the minds of fledgling writers.

Delving a bit deeper, we see that in addition to being stormy, the night is, well, dark.  Let that sink in a bit.  Now, it’s fair to say that some nights are darker than others, and perhaps the author is “setting the mood” by observing that the night is not lacking merely  sunlight but also the light of the moon and stars.  Again, hardly an unusual occurrence during a storm, when clouds tend to obscure the moon and stars.  In the final analysis, we have a dark night, and one uncommonly cumbersome sentence.

It may seem like nitpicking to remark that wind does not generally “check” rainfall, or that the mention of “streets” doesn’t necessarily suggest that the setting is in London, or that the self-referential use of the expression “our scene” immediately reminds the reader that the story is merely a story and nothing more, or that the lamps which at first seem to be struggling against that rattling wind are ultimately found to be struggling against darkness (you didn’t forget it was dark, did you?).  Perhaps it is nitpicking, but a single sentence with so many flaws (and there are others I haven’t mentioned) is worthy of ridicule.  But apart from these flaws, the awkward construction and clumsy imagery, the truly unforgivable sin is that it is essentially a dead metaphor signifying nothing in particular.

So, how to avoid such missteps in your all-important opening sentence, opening paragraph, and opening chapter?  The first rule is to ignore the voice in your head that tells you the best place to start is at the beginning.  True, Dickens got away with it: