DARK AND STORMY

©2009 by Richard S. Crawford

about 735 words

Download as PDF | Download as HTML

“It was a dark and stormy night,” he wrote.

Richard leaned back from the screen and looked at the phrase he had just written. “It was a dark and stormy night.” An incredibly trite way to start a story. Painfully trite. The annual Bulwer-Lytton contest, where hundreds of people submit the worst opening lines they can think of, was named after the author who first penned that line, “It was a dark and stormy night.” Charles Schultz parodied the phrase whenever Snoopy sat down to write his own novel, which never went anywhere.

“It was a dark and stormy night.”

He had actually started several stories with that phrase. One of them, “Who Remembers Molly”, had even been published — twice. By the time it was actually publishable, though, that famous opening line had been removed entirely.

The words sat there on the screen, recalcitrant and taunting. The goal here was to write a story that used that opening line, in such a clever way that it would subvert its trite nature and make it brilliant. If Richard could pull that off, he’d be one of most famous writers ever.

He sighed, leaned back in his chair again, and stroked his beard. Writing is, in fact, a lot harder than it has any right to be. You don’t just sit down and throw words at the screen. You have to make them stick somehow. Narrative ability is the glue that makes the words stick, both to the page and to the reader’s mind. It also made the words stick together in ways that…

Nope. That was a stupid metaphor. Richard had a habit of creating metaphors that adequately described a concept, and then adding to it, adding some more, then some more and some more, throwing words and ideas at it like a monkey flinging poop onto a pile in his cage at the San Francisco Zoo, until the metaphor loses all cohesion and collapses, much like the pile of monkey poop collapses in on itself and…

Yeah. Like that.

“It was a dark and stormy night.”

Cliches can always be subverted to the writer’s end. At least, that was Richard’s theory. He hadn’t been able to pull it off himself ever, nor was he able to think of any writers who had done it.

Maybe it just wouldn’t work. Maybe some cliches are so laden with narrative weight, so burdened with cultural baggage, that they were beyond subversion. Maybe since “It was a dark and stormy night” was by its cliched nature so bound to to the opening line of a story it just couldn’t be restored.

Richard yawned and rubbed his eyes. In the next room, the Roomba slid noisily across the floor, sucking up dust bunnies and spare bits of cat litter that had been flung out of the litter box by energetic cats. The night before had been a dark and stormy night. Well, maybe not all that stormy. Certainly not inspiring, at least. On a dark and stormy night, Richard expected to be inspired by the idea of ghosts, ghouls, vampires, or other creatures that wander through the dark. But no such luck this time. This time the rain had only inspired his allergies.

He stood up, went into the kitchen, and got an apple, hoping the brief movement and the fruit would invigorate his brain. Still, nothing happened.

The word processor window remained blank. Maybe he’d just have to give up on the idea. Maybe the best thing he could hope for, he thought, was just write a story about someone who desperately wanted to write a story that started out, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Thinking that the effort was probably doomed anyway, he put his fingers to the keyboard.

“It was a dark and stormy night,” he wrote.