The Bad First Sentence of Paul Clifford, Which Launched Ten Thousand Parodies

 

I've largely looked at good first sentences so far. For my first bad first sentence, what could be better than to choose the author who inspired two separate contests for bad sentences? 

Edward Bulwer-Lytton supported himself well with his writing. He published more than two dozen novels, plus several plays and collections of poetry. He was popular in his time, and sold books from 1827 to 1873 – a substantial career. Yet, now we recoil. In 1982, the English department of San Jose University started Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad first sentences, and in 2001, Adam Cadre started the Lyttle Lytton contest for efforts to generate equal cringe-worthiness at restrained length. Both contests continue to the present day. 

What happened? How does an author go from very successful to the icon of bad sentences? 

And what makes this sentence bad? 

I'll start off by saying I do think he used his punctuation well. That's damning with faint praise (a coinage from Mark Twain), I know. He also used a lot of words that create tension: dark, stormy, night, torrents, violent, gust, rattling, fiercely agitating, scanty, flame, struggled, darkness. 

Actually, that's our first clue: current sentences often gain their force from one or two well-chosen words. Bulwer-Lytton belongs to the Romantic school, where the more passionate words filled a sentence, the better. In our era, we are more often wishing our writers would get to the point than that they would carry us away in a flood of feeling. We like our sentences shorter. We also like them more restrained. 

Suppose we grant Bulwer-Lytton as many words as he pleases and also that those words be as dramatic as he chooses – are there still problems with the sentence? Yes. 

First, the sentence undercuts itself. If Bulwer-Lytton's aim was to create drama, he let the tension out badly with "except at occasional intervals" and "(for it is in London where our scene takes place)." "Except" sets up an opposition. In this case, the opposing force is lax and unspecific, so that all the previous drama leaks away. It was good sense to put in the parentheses – every word between them except "London" is bland and weak – and the parentheses let us pay less attention to those. It would have been better to omit the entire phrase, perhaps fitting "London" in somewhere else. Plus, "where our scene takes place" talks about the writing instead of about the story, pulling us out of the drama. 

Psychologists call observing a situation as if you were outside it "dissociation." It reduces the emotional intensity of an experience. It doesn't work with the large number of dramatic words here. 

There is a logical problem. Can many lamps have one flame? Wondering about that also pulled me from feeling into thinking. Then there's the way many elements of the scene all act: the rain falls, the wind checks and rattles and agitates, the lamps (or is it that flame?) struggle. It's hard to care about any member of this skirmish when they all have their moment in the sentence and none of them are human. 

Perhaps, since we are allowing many words, we must also allow repeating them. This sentence contains both dark and darkness. I wouldn't recommend that. Suppose Bulwer-Lytton had limited himself to the seven words before the semi-colon. There is redundancy even there. Night is dark, and a stormy night is more so. He doesn't need to tell us that. The only goal of including dark, stormy, and night together is to pile up emotion – which he will undercut later. 

Bulwer-Lytton's semicolon, parentheses, and commas separate the phrases well and give the reader many places to breathe before the period. But the sentence throws its efforts in too many directions to create a coherent mood. So even if he wants to stir the feelings and doesn't care if he is brief or restrained or logical, the sentence fails. If I was editing for modern tastes, I'd start by crossing out at least the words before the semicolon, the entire phrase that starts with except, and the parenthetical comment. And then I'd cross out some more. 

But I learned to write after Strunk and White laid down prescriptions for brevity. I sometimes disagree with them, and I still live in the zeitgeist they reflected. Bulwer-Lytton died almost half a century before the first edition of the Elements of Style. His time was more willing to forgive extra words. 

Graphic design by Ken Silbert

A Hat Full of Sky

 

Terry Pratchett made me laugh more than any other author. A Hat Full of Sky is the first of his books to feature Tiffany Aching, and a good entry point within his phenomenally popular Discworld series. 

Right away, he's creating a humorous atmosphere. John Vorhaus' book The Comic Toolbox gave me a vocabulary and an awareness of techniques for comedy; Terry Pratchett taught me by demonstration over the course of decades and the forty-one books in the Discworld series. I am richer for both their work.

The first truth about humor is that no joke works for everyone. What brings one person to helpless laughter can leave another person cold. Terry Pratchett's writing worked very well for me and for quite a few others, as witnessed by the millions of copies of his books sold worldwide. 

What techniques make this sentence funny? First, there's a funny name. Vorhaus notes that this is a hard technique to pull off. "Nac Mac Feegle" has a sharp rhythm then a fade. With the hard endings of the final letter Cs, "Nac Mac" reads as two strong syllables. They are short, and, to pronounce them, we need a bit of a stop after each C, so that come as two separated raps. "Feegle" on the other hand, starts with an emphasis that trails off into the almost swallowed syllable "gle"– and it's an unknown word which is closest to the English word "feeble." The contrast between strong and weak syllables sets up a surprise. Much of humor comes from unexpected combinations like this. 

We have a variety of associations with fairies. The most popular are of bright, small, winged, and pretty creatures. Another strand views them as glamorous, dangerous, alien tricksters and warriors. So these ideas are already jostling as we attempt to place the Nac Mac Feegle as a fairy race. We don't associate either of these versions of fairies with "drunk." So the second beat of humor comes by placing that expectation-breaking word in the strong position at the end of the sentence. Vorhaus taught me very clearly that a twist on the final word was an essential comedy technique. Pratchett hits it perfectly here. 

There's another misfitting between the academic tone of "the most dangerous of the fairy races, particularly when" and the word "drunk" as well. We expect a serious, upright lecture. We get a popular word for a situation that very polite company would gloss over. That puncturing of staid behavior may be one of the reasons British humor works well for me. 

I miss Terry Pratchett. The first sentence of A Hat Full of Sky reminds me of some of the reasons, and the promise of laughter – and the mystery of a new group of fairies – would lead me to read on. 

Graphic design by Ken Silbert