Just finished a six-week course on developmental editing taught by Barbara Sjoholm. It was a great class and I recommend it to anyone considering developmental editing — or who just wants to get better at editing their own work.
After all the information on pacing, dialog, plot, structure, and character development, Barbara's parting words of advice were:
"If you can help rid the world of sentences like "'That's funny,' shesaid laughingly," you will have done literature a service."
It's good advice, but it got me thinking about the Dark and Stormy Night series. It was an annual contest (the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest to be exact) to see who could come up with the worst opening line to a novel. Does anyone remember this?
For example, here's an entry:
On the fifth morning of Juby's new but still unconsummated marriage, the scrambled eggs, looking like cow paddies dropped from a disgruntled bovine with peptic ulcers in three of her four stomachs, lay on his plate like a ominous forecast of the day yet to be weathered."Edward L. Recod, Sacramento, Calif.
Well, I'm in the mood, after weeks of editing manuscripts, to write some really bad prose . . on purpose. If anyone wants to offer up a terrible opening line, please do. I'd love to share it.
OK, I'm off to work on mine.
Diane
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