It Was A Dark And Stormy Night.....

No, Snoopy was not the first to use it.

However, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, an annual event sponsored by San Jose Sate University, encourages writers to do so. Contestants are invited "to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels" – that is, deliberately bad. It was the brain child of Scott Rice of the English Department at San Jose State University and is named "in honor" of English novelist and playwright Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, author of the much-quoted first line "It was a dark and stormy night."

Here’s the original opening sentence from Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford:

"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."

The contest has taken on a life of its own with no less than six books with the “best” entries published.

Here are the rules and the “winners”. Below are a couple of winning entries.

Gerald began--but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing  permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash--to pee.  --Jim Gleeson, Madison, WI (2007)

On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.  --Rephah Berg, Oakland CA (2002)

(A side note for trivia buffs: Lytton coined phrases that have become common in our language such as "the pen is mightier than the sword," "the great unwashed," and "the almighty dollar".)