It Was A Dark And Stormy Night . . .

A blogger I follow (Margie, who writes a blog called Amusives) recently shined her spotlight on the annual Bulwer-Lytton contest which has been overseen by the English Department at San Diego State University for over forty years. The contest is named after Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a nineteenth-century English author whose works are not well remembered today. Not well remembered, that is, other than his famous opening phrase for a now-obscure 1830 novel. “It was a dark and stormy night . . . ” was a phrase plucked from obscurity by Charles M. Schultz in his “Peanuts” comic strip and has come to serve as shorthand for bad (or at least badly overdone) writing.

Margie featured several entries from the 2001 edition of the Bulwer-Lytton contest – a contest which seeks a sentence to begin the worst possible novel. I loved them, of course. I have always loved writing that is purposefully bad (and, I suppose, also writing that is only accidentally bad). But she got me wondering if I had the chops to start the world’s worst novel.

I started with a paragraph, and then (as often happens) I got caught up in things and kept going for several paragraphs more. So please take take the start of this horrid novel for a test drive. I would love your thoughts on how it should finish.

***

It was a dark and stormy night when Dirk and Stella put their plan into action. Who would have thought, just a few weeks earlier when they met, that their lives would have taken this turn. He, a man who had failed at every worthwhile thing he had ever tried to do, yet with the look of one who could do no wrong, as he peered over his horn-rimmed glasses, wondering why he had not chosen the wire frames.

Stella, on the other hand, had been a bombshell since the day she completed a growth spurt on entering the 4th grade. The 4th grade boys had not known what to make of her but by 8th grade they had mostly figured it out. Still, Stella had not let her external appearance (and all of the emotional baggage that came with it) get in the way of making her life count for something, if only as an object lesson for others.

The two had met as so many others have met - as souls adrift at separate ends of a seedy bar. It was the kind of a place you might take your mother, but only after she had abandoned her husband and tried, but failed, to drown you and the other kids. As Dirk nursed yet another of an unending number of $3 Planters Punchs, which were on special only because of an unsolved theft of multiple cases of rum from a local warehouse, he stared off into space - the space occupied by the girl whose outfit was already undoing the big buttons on his shirt.

Stella was, herself, no stranger to an alcoholic haze, which, had the bartender the slightest bit of imagination, would have been on the $3 special menu for the night along with the Planter's Punch. She saw the eyes that peered at her as so many eyes, always in pairs, had peered at her before. What, she wondered, was with this guy? She knew this was a place that existed solely for men to pick up women and for women who were not too choosy about who was doing the picking. But how could any guy with half a brain expect to get anywhere in this place by wearing a clown costume? Could the "half a brain" part of that question have been the answer to it? Maybe, but Stella's life had never been so well ordered as to provide a simple answer to a direct question.

Stella was more intrigued than pleased when Dirk ambled across the room and sidled up to her. This kind of sidling never turned out well for Stella. Or for the families of the missing men who had, unbeknownst to them, been the ones doing the sidling. But Dirk was different. Stella broke into laughter as Dirk, more surprised than hurt, asked what she was laughing at. "That's a strange question coming from a clown", she replied. It was the first laugh Dirk had gotten all night, even after trying far too hard for them during his time on stage earlier in the evening. "Maybe", he thought, "things are looking up." It did not occur to him that this witless observation was exactly the sort of cliche' his life had become.

Without even realizing it, Dirk knew that his life, and that of this girl he lacked the intelligence or experience to describe, was about to take a bizarre turn - the kind of turn that leaves everyone around them trying to remember life before the explosion and subsequent fireball that wiped out the town in those bad movies that used to fill late night television. Would that kind of explosion and fireball have been a better fate for Dirk and Stella than the one that was soon to befall them? Perhaps, though neither of them thought to ask that oh, so obvious question.

Perhaps they were too busy to think of such things when Dirk went in for the kiss. For him, it was like diving into pool filled with smoke and bourbon and darkness. For her, it just left a funny taste in her mouth.

***

The possibilities for Dirk and Stella are, of course, limitless. Do they go on a killing spree? Do they get jobs on a Disney cruise ship? Do they descend into a bottomless pit of self-destructive behavior that leads to their deaths? Or perhaps it is all of the above?

I cannot decide what it means that I found this process to be tremendous fun – am I a bad writer? A good bad writer or a bad bad writer? Or just a bad good writer who can also be a good bad writer? I am so confused. But at least I am not wearing a clown suit.

18 thoughts on “It Was A Dark And Stormy Night . . .”

  1. I’m liking this start a bunch. You definitely fall under the good, bad writer banner.

    A number of possibilities for Stella came to mind when I saw a link to your “Trump’s Stormy Week” post from 2018. The picture of Stormy Daniels tried to bias my outcome for a potential future career path for both Stella and Dirk, especially since Dirk is already somewhat in the entertainment industry. Anyway, excluding that…

    Stella uses her feminine wiles about thirty minutes later to captivate Dirk. After setting the hook, so to speak, Stella convinces Dirk to help her and “some friends” offload this abundance of rum one of the friends has acquired. Little does Dirk know this is only the first step to his getting pulled into the Armenia Mafia to be a front man for their activities so that the Armenians can remain in the background, being the puppet-master to Dirk, and ultimately, so they plan, Stella.

    Yet little does anyone anticipate the true abilities of Dirk, a man who inadvertently finds the arena in which his true talent lie, who eventually bumbles his way into toppling this syndicate while scraping through untarnished and with a not inconsiderable sum of the Armenian’s financial gains. Stella, who is shaken to the core by all of these monumental events, disappears to join a convent, figuring nobody there will have seen any of her celluloid moments.

    Dirk sees merit in changing his name and, cloaked in a shroud of mystery about his personal history, later wins the Indianapolis mayoral race.

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  2. I’m not sure if “Well done” undermines the point or not…

    You are well set up for anything with this opening. A redemption story arc seems to be where the setup is going from the off; however, a crime spree seems almost as likely. And a twist in the story seems to also undermine the point of writing deliberately poorly.

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  3. Always love the BL contest and have been tracking it for years. If I had to say one thing about the winners, they all seem to have terrible (or great!) run-on sentences, and have the most incongruous absurdities in the shortest amount of words! Have at it!

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  6. Wow, this was one of the best of the worst I’ve ever read at Bulwer-Lytton. I especially liked ‘as he peered over his horn-rimmed glasses, wondering why he had not chosen the wire frames’. ‘the object lesson’ observation was spot on as was the description of the mother!
    I completely lack your talent for writing so haven’t a clue how you should end it other than to suggest it has the makings of a very short story. I see Dirk and Stella as moths who burn out in the flame of the candle rather quickly…

    Thanks for the link to my post! I am happy to have provided you with the inspiration to write so badly good… or goodly bad.

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    • Haha, thank you! And thank you for the inspiration to try this. I am not so sure it’s as much about writing ability as it is about the way my mind can wander into all kinds of weird places during the course of a conventional thought. That may or may not be a trait to aspire to. 🙂

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  9. Well this is a twist from your usual posts JP – maybe, in addition to your new venture, you could get a side hustle as an author. 🙂 Would you have a pen name? As to Stella and Dirk, I don’t picture them heading out the door and going on a crime spree, a la Bonnie and Clyde, but I see them more going to the casino where Dirk will keep handing Stella quarters to feed the one-armed bandit. When his pockets are bare and Stella hasn’t won a penny, he lets out two long wails of “Hey Stella” the likes of the lines uttered by Marlon Brandon’s character in “A Streetcar Named Desire” to which Stella says “no more money sweet cheeks, I’m finding me another sucker!”

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