Hack your way out of writer’s block with tips like freewrite a while, take a walk, change your cloths, talk to a monkey, or vacuum your lungs.
Hack your way out of writer’s block with tips like freewrite a while, take a walk, change your cloths, talk to a monkey, or vacuum your lungs.
I hear a charge of adrenalin is a great way to clear the mind. Maybe downloading suspicious spam that could wreck your computer should be added as a possible cure for writer’s block.
We can calm down now. The threat is elementated–alienated–whatever.
My wife asked me the other day why “It was a dark and stormy night” is so maligned as an opening line. I’d like to hear analysis from Phil, Lars & anyone else who would care to comment.
“It was a dark and stormy night” is actually the first line of a real novel, Paul Clifford, written by the Victorian novelist and politician, Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Somehow it has become an emblem of bad writing (for one thing, nights are generally dark, so that word is redundant). Charles Schulz popularized the line by having Snoopy start his perennially unfinished novel, again and again, with those words. The annual Bulwer-Lytton Award for bad first lines immortalizes the idea.
Here’s the Wikipedia page.
Beyond the redundancy, I was guessing that the passive voice of the verb added to it’s badness. What else distinguishes this sentence as a bad opening line?
The whole sentence is “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.” I think I read a critique of that and following lines, pointing out such things as the narrator correcting himself with “except at occasional intervals.” If the wind must sweep up the streets, why can’t it sweep up London streets?
It’s badly overwritten, but fairly representative of a lot of prose that people liked in those days. Remember, this was a successful novel.
Wind doesn’t rattle either. I had to run earlier or I would have commented more. If you want to dip into the first several pages of Paul Clifford, you can do so through Google Books.
Well if I can speak on behalf of the defense; nights vary greatly in their ‘darkness’ – depending on cloud cover and stage of the moon.
– I’ll let someone else defend the rest of the sentence (if they can.)
– I don’t like long rambling sentences, but there is a course floating around on the internet called ‘Building great sentences’ [TTC]and the professor is in love with long (long) sentences, and claims this is the secret to great writing.
I meant to post this yesterday; but I just happened (the next day)after my (tongue in cheek) comment, to read a chapter on Proverbs 1. There you read of a dark night. (King James version)
I gather you meant to say Proverbs 7:8-9, “Passing through the street near her corner; and he went the way to her house, in the twilight, in the evening, in the black and dark night.”
This should lead me to a post on the weaknesses of KJV. Oop, I must go.