Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Challenge Bulwer-Lytton Challenge

After checking out the link in Meredith\'s Post , I got to thinking. Then I got busy and forgot what I had been thinking about. Then I thought about this:

Write a really bad beginning to a phony fic. Keep it one sentence long, but that sentence can be as long as you like.

It's kind of like Badfic, only shorter. Check the link in Mere's post if you need inspiration or just want to know what the heck I'm talking about.

Well, I'm tired and dizzy and stuff and haven't really written anything in ages... but I'll give it a shot. Maybe I'll come back later with something better, but for now...

---

It was a dark and stormy night -- or, at least, it should have been, but, for some inexplicable reason, fate had decided to make it a warm and vaguely muggy midafternoon (the kind that's not really much of anything... not really clear, not really stormy, not really ominous... just sort of uncomfortable in the blandest way possible) when Clark Kent (who is -- unbeknownst to most, but, due to the miracle of alternate universe chronicling or something like that, beknownst to us -- in fact, Superman, except that he's really Clark Kent because that's who he's always been and Superman is more of a cardboard cutout personality he created so that he can use his powers, which he has because he's an alien from Krypton, which has a red sun, living on Earth, which has a yellow sun, for Good without endangering, you know, like his family and friends and stuff) came home to discover that Lois Lane, beautiful intrepid award-winning reporter for the Daily Planet and wife of Clark Kent (who, as mentioned, is also Superman, but only some of the time, when he has to be to do good deeds and preform rescues and go to charity events and stuff like that), had eaten all the chocolate in the house and, in a fit of desperate withdrawl, had opened up the secret case of chocolate-coated Kryptonite they'd kept hidden in a lead box in a secret drawer in the back of the fridge, camoflaged by a screen of old mayonaise jars, mustard bottles, and Chinese take-out boxes, thus endangering and potentially dooming her husband (who is sometimes a superhero, but not always) by exposing him to the deadly substance from his home planet which was the only thing which could possibly hurt or kill him (the substance, not the planet) for no better reason than that she was out of chocolate, which, really, come to think, wasn't that bad a reason.

---

Paul, who doesn't think he has a chance of beating out Mere's pet shop story, but what the hey. It's all in not-so-good fun.

My head is spinning, Paul! You're just too good at this!


Wendy

Isn't there a famous instance of a published novel (a classic?) where the first sentence takes up the entire first page?

Or was I dreaming when I heard that?

Regardless - kudos, Paul! Should have realised this one was just made for you! <g>

LabRat

Well, Erica, who is me by the way, (/me points a finger to herself and waves with the other hand), after reading Paul's attempt to make a narration with just one sentence, wanted to try the same thing and give this challenge a try because she, who is always very afraid of how people will react to her shitty things, knows that bad English is a trademark, almost a fingerprint she should say, on her stories which doesn't mean that they are not readable, at least people say they are, but somehow her BRs, who are very nice people who tell her that she needs to re-work her stuff all the time because they seem awkward to native speakers, also say that her stories, even the famous sunday-posted ones that she calls MTLVs, micro little-tiny-vignettes, which are her especiality around these boards, are good ones, but not many people read them because they don't have the time, and they never have time for her stuff she wonders why, or because they are busy writing their own stuff, which are very good by the way, but somehow are so difficult for her to understand that she has to read them with a dictionary, not really only one but three dictionaries opened,-- (Collins, Oxford, and the other one she forgot the name and has to go and check... ah okay... Michaellis), just to get half of the words she doesn't know not because she is stupid, illiterate, dumb or anything like that, but only because she has never been to any country that speaks the language, which is English by the way, so she has to read, write, and speak using her very limited foreign vocabulary, which sucks if you ask her opinion, but of course you didn't ask her that because if you did, she would say she is just joking and that she knows that she is improving each day because of her great friends around who support her even when she thinks about giving up due to real life problems and for personal reasons as well, which means that, no matter what, she will try to improve and write more each day because she knows people support her here, and for which she is truly very greatful and that's why she tried to respond to this challenge though she is not sure if she succeeded or not... maybe she didn't, but she hopes she will receive some feedback so she will know if people understood what she wanted to say or if she will need a BR to translate all this booky English into colloquial English.


MDL. Trying to breathe here. Phew!!!

MAN, you two, I don't think anybody can top you. I had to go use my inhaler and I wasn't even reading those two entries out loud!

~Toc

Dang!

Those two were amazing! How the heck did you do that?!

See ya,
AnnaBtG. (stunned)

Mad Dog, for an ESL writer...that was kind of a triumph!

LabRat

Here are my two submissions, one relatively short, the other longer:

I. Little did Clark Kent suspect, as he placed his classified ad in the Daily Planet that fateful morning, that the inadvertent omission of a single letter would result in the untimely demise of his fledgling Supper Man Catering Service, and consequently the beginning of our story.

II. Lex Luthor laughed as he held out the small piece of crystal, atomic number 36, CAS Registry ID 7439-90-9, whose face-centered cubic structure is common to all rare gases in the solid state, and which, although normally colorless is characterized by its brilliant green and orange spectral lines, the effects of which we won't dwell on at the moment, except to note that in 1960 it was internationally agreed that the fundamental unit length, the metre, should be defined as 1 m = 1,650,763.73 wavelengths (in vacuo) of the orange-red line of Kr-33, and to further note that Superman was currently writhing in pain on the penthouse floor.

- Vicki (who hastens to add that entry #2 is not, technically, an original sentence, since a large portion of it is copied almost verbatum from a webpage about the Periodic Table .)

edited to correct the atomic number!

Now, can you say that all in one breath?

Anna, it wasn't really that hard. I just turned off my natural babble-filters, which, really, aren't that strong in the first place, if you think about it, because I do tend to go on and on with these long random trains of thought (often interrupted by short-to-medium-length parentheticals -- and yes, I do actually think in parentheticals), and so all I really had to do was encourage that tendency while trying to come up with fun and random things along the way and... I'll shut up now.

I am impressed with those who can come up with shorter entries, like last year's "The boat skipped across the harbor in exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't." Babbling is easy. That (whatever it is) takes talent (of a sort... ).

Paul

Yes, Wendy (and others), please give it a try. (It's fun!)

Paul and Erica, yours both had me ROTFL. (As did the originals on the Bulwer-Lytton webpage!)

Here's another stab at it:

Flying in Superman's arms, Lois felt the wind on her face in much the same way as does a pitbull, panting in delight and barking at passing cars with its head out the passenger side window of its owner's Ford pickup as it barrels down the highway stretching seemingly endlessly before it on a sunny Texas afternoon, except there were no passing cars, only a lone airplane lowering its landing gear as it approached Carter International airport, and it wasn't a sunny Texas afternoon but was actually a rather dark and stormy Metropolis night, and, of course, Lois wasn't a pitbull even if her nickname was Mad Dog Lane.

- Vicki

WOW!!! Give it a try after all those rocking entries?

PS: in the first submission, the Georges Perec occurrence refers to his book “La disparition”. A book from which the letter ‘e’ is totally absent. Quite a challenge when you know it’s one of the most –if not the most- used letter in French.

PPS: now me wonders if dialogs do qualify...

Well done, Cyad!

OK, I've got one foot out the door, but I just had to post another one before I left:

It was at the precise moment that a super-sized sneeze blew the glasses off his face and half-way across the parking lot, only to land on the pavement at Lois Lane's feet, that Clark Kent knew that the gig was up.

OK, OK, I know it sucks, but these are so much fun to write!

- Vicki

Vicki, I think you might have found yourself the fledging beginnings of a new career.

LabRat

Not sure if this is going to work, but I'll give it a shot.

While somewhere in Italy, Buffy Summers, beautiful young vampire slayer and all-around force of good, finally triumphed against the entity known only as The Immortal, whom she had lulled into a false sense of security by pretending to fall in love with him, and thought about Angel, the vampire who was her soulmate but who could not be her boyfriend because the gypsy curse that had given him his soul back would be broken if they were together, and while, unbeknownst to her, the aforementioned Angel fought a desperate apocalyptic battle against the overwhelming hordes of the forces of darkness, whom he had vaguely annoyed by killing off some of their higher-level mortal lackeys (thus forcing the forces of darkness to suffer the inconvenience of having to find some other lackeys to promote), and while, off on a planet far away, a duck-like alien named Howard was shocked and very pleased to see a gorgeous blonde woman (whose name was Samantha Carter, and who was a part of the top-secret Earth oginization known as Stargate Command) step through a mysterious circular portal, and while, in Keystone City, Barry Allen (also known as the Scarlet Speedster, the super-fast superhero The Flash), tied up the villain Captain Cold, and while, in the New York City of another universe, Peter Parker, the amazing Spider-man webbed his way across town, desperately hoping to be at least close to on time for a date with his supermodel girlfriend, Mary Jane Watson, and while, on the distant planet of Thundera, a small party of cat-like aliens known as Thundercats, including the cub, Lion-O, who would be their king, fled the ruins of their world in a small spaceship piloted by the doomed but wise old Jagga, and while Scott Summers, the mutant known as Cyclops, who was not related to Buffy, the vampire slayer, but was the son of the kidnapped earthling turned intergalactic space pirate Corsair and the husband of Jean Grey, who was sometimes possessed by the incredibly powerful cosmic entity knowns as the Pheonix (and who had an unfortunate tendency to temporarily die every few years) and the father (by Madeline Pryor, the clone of Jean Grey who had temporarily replaced her while Jean was dead again) of Nathaniel Chistopher Charles Summers (who was also known as Nathan Dayspring, Cable, and the prophesized last hope of mankind, the Askani'son, and who had been sent forwards in time shortly after his birth and infected with a techno-organic virus which was slowly taking over his body, its progress slowed only by the constant use of the psionic powers he had inherited from his mother) and the rest of whose family tree is way too complicated to even attempt to explain without a flow chart, led the team of mutants known as the X-men in a training mission in the team's holographic Danger Room, and while, in yet another world, the Teletubby known as Tinky Winky paused to ponder some odd questions that were floating in his mind about boys and girls and who was more fun to play with, and while the Harlem Globetrotters practiced their world-famous basketball tricks in preparation for another exhibition and hoped that they would not encounter yet more supervillains who would require them to use their secret super powers to win against a team of basketball-playing kangaroos or similarly difficult opponents in order to save the day, in Metropolis, Clark Kent (who was secretly Superman, the Man of Steel -- which, really, was odd because he wasn't made of steel, and could, in fact, as it was well-known, bend steel in his bare hands, but probably could not, for the most part, bend himself with his bare hands), who had never met any of the people mentioned above and probably never would, looked at his beautiful, brilliant, talented, stubborn, determined, pigheaded, infuriating, and generally amazing partner, Lois Lane (who was thinking about his chocolate-brown eyes and wondering if that was really the word to be using because even though she loved chocolate, what she mostly liked to do with chocolate was eat it, and thinking about chocolate eyes was actually pretty disgusting), and sighed.

(Words in bold are the ones that are actually required for this sentence. )

Paul

/me remembers a certain irc conversation about Teletubbies not so long ago and falls over laughing...



LabRat

"These entries are so funny," Anna Botsakou (also known as Anna B. the Greek and also with the nickname "Anouk" that her friend Elina had given her three years ago, after watching the French movie "Chocolat", which is about a woman named... something she couldn't remember as she wrote the sentence, who had a chocolaterie - hopefully this works in English too - in a village somewhere in France and also had a daughter named Anouk, who was a kind of weird girl, but Elina didn't nickname Anna after Anouk because she was a weird girl - although Anna did carry a bit of insanity but who doesn't, after all - but because the names Anna and Anouk begin with the sound An) thought and decided to write an entry herself, in order to congratulate all the posters for making such amazing and fun efforts, and also because she wanted to see just how long a sentence she could form in English, although as she typed it occurred to her that this was not the best kind of practice she could do, so she thought about finishing her sentence, but she didn't want to do that because typing nonsense was so much fun, certainly more fun than studying for the Advanced Mathematics exam she had the next day, and besides it was still 4.34 p.m. and she had plenty of time to study until the Greece-Kazakhstan football match began (here she made a mental note of asking her brothers or her father what time did the match actually begin and what channel it was on), but then she realized a sentence can't possibly be as long as what she had just written, which probably meant that the sentence was getting too long and tiring (at this point she began wondering if anyone would read this sentence until the end), so she placed a period in order to finish it.

See ya,
AnnaBtG.

Another shorter entry:

Floyd and Edna Wilson watched in awe as Superman disappeared into the clouds floating in the Florida sunset like puddles of Milk of Magnesia in a sea of Pepto Bismol.

I've been attempting to compose a very short opening sentence, such as the one Paul quotes, but they are just TOO hard to do. I give up!

- Vicki

Rat,

As for a famous classic novel with a sentence that lasts the whole page--have you ever read any Nathaniel Hawthorne? He's definitely up there, although I'm not sure about a *first* sentence that's like that. Since I'm long past 10th-grade English I don't have any future plans to read any more Nathaniel Hawthorne, ever, so I'll probably never know. Small loss.

No, doubt it was Hawthorne. I actually went looking, but couldn't find anything. Did, however, find some indication that good as you guys are, you've a long way to go

A whole novel? Heavens to Murgatroyd!

LabRat