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Bad fiction Date: Sent Wednesday, March 21, 2001 Category: None

Rating: 2.63/5 (94 votes) Click a button to cast your vote

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"Delores breezed along the surface of her life like a flat stone forever skipping along smooth water, rippling reality sporadically but oblivious to it consistently, until she finally lost momentum, sank, and due to an over-dose of fluoride as a child which caused her to suffer from chronic apathy, doomed herself to lie forever on the floor of her life as useless as an appendix and as lonely as a five-hundred pound barbell in a steroid-free fitness center."

-Winning sentence,
1990 Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest.

Source Comment: The contest is actually for the 'best' first sentence of a novel. It comes from the writings of Lord Bulwer-Lytton who wrote the classic line, 'It was a dark and stormy night;' so beloved of Snoopy in the Peanuts comic strip.

The actual first line from _Paul Clifford_ is as follows:

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.

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