In response to a writing prompt at Life With a Little One and More
Fun and Games with Jenners
in which entrants are challenged to submit
bad opening sentences to imaginary novels
My entry:
The day after the first attempt on her life failed, Sassafras
awoke with a heart as light as a bowling ball wouldn't be.
5 comments:
This is fantastic (: Glad to have found your blog(s)!
Ok ... this totally rocked! I love it -- the name, the imagery! Truly bad -- and I mean that in the best way possible!
thanks for playing! I will be sharing this with everyone who doesn't visit tomorrow! I loved it! : )
Must have been one of those synthetic balls. {*grin*}
When I taught writing in adult ed. classes at a community college, I had a long list of bad first lines that I found in a magazine. If I find it, I will share. I got the idea for my entry from some anonymous middle school students. About 12 years ago when I was teaching art, one of the language arts teachers asked me to help judge student entries into a metaphor & simile contest. Several students wrote things like, the rock was as hard as a pillow wasn't or it floated like a cement block couldn't ---sort of reverse imagery. They were so bad and yet so funny that I decided to use something similar. My first thought for opposites was light and heavy ---that's how my first line was born.
The 2008 winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest was originally from my local area (western PA.)
Garrison Spik wrote:
Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."
The contest coordinator credited the man-hole cover as the clincher in putting Spik's entry at the top.
Find Spik's other submissions here: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/scott.rice/Garrison.htm
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