For copyright reasons — and because the editor of this esteemed on-line publication is too chintzy to spring for reproduction rights — you’re going to have to imagine Snoopy sitting on top of his doghouse, typewriter balanced between his paws, with Charles Schulz’s drawing captioned (per usual) with the opening line of our hero’s novel, “It was a dark and stormy night.” Then again, we, members of Boy Scout Troop B, Maidstone Grammar School, would warble around the campfire —

It was a dark and stormy night
A man stood in the street
His aged eyes were full of tears
His boots were full of feet.

— imagining this to be the first ever occasion anyone had come up with such erudite prose. God, we were hilarious. As was Victorian novelist-poet-politician Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton (unwittingly so) when he began his novel Paul Clifford with:

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.

Not being a member of the great unwashed, Baron Bulwer-Lytton knew that the pen is mightier than the sword, for in the former he made his living, such is the power of the almighty dollar. And such is the power of the hackneyed cliché, the man having invented all the above. He also wrote The Last Days of Pompeii — you might have seen one of the eight — count ’em — movie adaptations of his novel.

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, Privy Council of the United Kingdom (1803-1873) by Henry William Pickersgill (Public domain)

Back to the dark and stormy matter in hand. Needless to say, we should avoid such clichés like the plague. Mark my words, it’s better to call a spade a spade and cut to the chase than attempt to gild the lily by the use of convoluted and hackneyed prose. The name of the game, after all, is to keep it simple, stupid, or it’s only a matter of time before your sins will catch up with you…the matter, in this case, being the winning entry in this year’s (the 35th) Lyttoniad: “Conceived to honor the memory of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton and to encourage unpublished authors who do not have the time to actually write entire books, the contest challenges entrants to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels.”

Here’s the 2017 winner:

The elven city of Losstii faced towering sea cliffs and abutted rolling hills that in the summer were covered with blankets of flowers and in the winter were covered with blankets, because the elves wanted to keep the flowers warm and didn’t know much at all about gardening.

(Kat Russo of Loveland, Colorado, the author of this impressive opening line, describes herself as “having twenty-six years of experience in covering social awkwardness with humor and stories about her cats. She spends her time working in outdoor retail and at a wildlife rehabilitation center while trying to figure out how to use her art degree.”)

The annual Bulwer-Lytton contest isn’t the only one to celebrate bad writing. The contestants in B-L are, of course, deliberately striving for maximum badness, but it’s more fun to acknowledge inadvertent schlock, hence the “Bad Writing Contest” in the magazine Philosophy and Literature. The contest, sadly, ran only from 1995 to 1998, and the entries in this case were submitted by readers, not writers. That is, they weren’t intended as parodies, and were usually culled from papers or books written by academics who, living in their postmodern ivory towers, may not have known better. Many entries were long (“prolixity is often a feature of bad writing,” according to the contest organizers), but some prove the maxim (not really a maxim, more of a vague thought looking for self-importance) that greatness can come in small doses. Or shots. Draughts?

Here’s one of the shorter ones, from The Continental Philosophy Reader, edited by Richard Kearney and Mara Rainwater (Routledge, 1996), offering a whole new take on the use of scare quotes:

Since thought is seen to be “rhizomatic” rather than “arboreal,” the movement of differentiation and becoming is already imbued with its own positive trajectory.

And my favorite, from Making Monstrous: Frankenstein, Criticism, Theory, by Fred Botting (Manchester University Press, 1991), because it sums up my life — all lives — in a single sentence:

The lure of imaginary totality is momentarily frozen before the dialectic of desire hastens on within symbolic chains.

Gotta run, night’s coming, looks like it could be stormy. Dark, too.