The notes blatted skyward as the sun rose over the Canada geese, feathered rumps mooning the day, webbed appendages frantically peddling unseen bicycles in their search for sustenance, driven by Nature's maxim, "Ya wanna eat, ya gotta work," and at last I knew Pittsburgh.
--Sheila B. Richter, Minneapolis, Minnesota (1987 Winner)
Like an expensive sports car, fine-tuned and well-built, Portia was sleek, shapely, and gorgeous, her red jumpsuit molding her body, which was as warm as the seatcovers in July, her hair as dark as new tires, her eyes flashing like bright hubcaps, and her lips as dewy as the beads of fresh rain on the hood; she was a woman driven--fueled by a single accelerant--and she needed a man, a man who wouldn't shift from his views, a man to steer her along the right road, a man like Alf Romeo.
--Rachel E. Sheeley, Williamsburg, Indiana (1988 Winner)
As the newest Lady Turnpot descended into the kitchen wrapped only in her celery-green dressing gown, her creamy bosom rising and falling like a temperamental souffle, her tart mouth pursed in distaste, the sous-chef whispered to the scullery boy, "I don't know what to make of her."
--Laurel Fortuner, Montendre, France (1992 Winner)
On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.
Rephah Berg, Oakland CA (2002 Winner)
As her quivering lips met his, and her eyelashes fluttered softly on his sweating cheek, Dr Robbins reflected, "I didn't realize she had upper dentures . . . in fact, her slippery plastic palate reminds me of going down a waterslide that hasn't been properly chlorinated, as evidenced by the distinct nitrous and sulfurous emanations, or could it be sinus trouble?"
Philip Bateman
Kenilworth, South Africa
What a pity Dave was too young to have seen "2001: A Space Odyssey," for he might have been able to predict what would happen next, when the ape standing next to the big black slab picked up the tapir bone.
Ann Medlock
Lenah Valley, TAS, Australia
A rather youthful Billy Joel was fascinated when he entered the Green Room at the Tonight Show and saw a group of matronly nuns hastily applying hair color to the noggin of the show's next guest, Neil Young, whose agent offered an explanation from the corner of the room: "Only the good dye Young."
Joe Wyatt
Amarillo, TX
My favourite one, which I can't find on their website but was how I first heard about the contest, was a sentence along the lines of stratus fractonimbus clouds condensing in the troposphere as a hydrogen-helium star with a spectral class of G2V slowly descended below the locus of points which have an altitude of zero degrees and so on and so on and so on, followed by a semicolon and “in other words, it was a dark and stormy night.”
It's probably particularly egregious if a Canadian writes an opening line about the weather. So predictable. Sometimes it's all we talk about. But who can blame us? Last Thursday it was –27 degrees and the car wouldn’t start. Today it's going to be 12 and the car was slinging up a hammock as I left for work on my bike. While work and relationships stagnate, the weather is full of surprises. But I guess it doesn't make for riveting literature. (Although weather events like hurricanes and ice storms do bring to mind that Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times.")
So if you come across an opening line that contains references to the weather, don't bother reading the rest of the story. It's going to be a waste of your time. For while you can't judge a book by its cover, you can by its opening line.
5 comments:
Hemingway's famous advice for young writers was: "Don't forget the weather."
Really?!
Just not as an opening line perhaps...
And yet here I am, at the end of the post.
I was just sitting here in the USA, talking on the phone with a friend in more southerly USA, saying how last week we had night temps of -15F and today it hit more than 60F, which is like 75 degrees difference, but of course there's always a January thaw, we even have a word for it, well, two words, January thaw, and it was a bright and sunny day, at least a good bit of it.
It's a rather dark and stormy night here at the moment. Seriously. Although I guess most nights are by definition dark. Is that why it's considered such a bad line?
And yes, you got the bit about the weather in the opening line. I'm trying to write a bunch of very short pieces for my nephews and put them together in booklet form. This is the one I'm going to begin with because we've all started to read the first line of every book we pick up.
I thought it was mainly the English and NZers who talked about the weather. I'll add Canadians to the list.
Living somewhere where you can't talk about the weather would be depressing. After two weeks in Bahrain I found myself waking up and looking out the window and thinking "oh no, not hot, sunny and cloudless AGAIN!"
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