The post yesterday about the Dark & Stormy Nights contest reminded me of one of my favorite bad opening lines — it’s from a self-published novel by R.J. Carrie-Reddington entitled "Six Days of the Pigs."
Midway between dawn and sunrise the Tuesday morning air, heavy with
nature’s fog, reeked with the acrid odor of pig feces as the skinny white man
stood at the edge of the front porch, listening to Addie cry.
There’s a good reason why this book was self-published.
Maybe then initialed R.J. had just watched another rerun of the Pollack classic “Three Days of the Condor”, when his winning “Pig” title came to him?
Co-incidentally the original novel was entitled “Six Days of the Condor” – but six days is way too long to stretch a movie. Another good reason why Pigs won’t fly.
But, but, but, that’s not even a sentence. There is no noun or verb. And is there a difference between dawn and sunrise? It has lots of atmosphere though.
YIKES! A few seconds of that sentence felt like 6 days with the pigs to me.
Perfect, he’s a journalist as if they need anything else to carry. It’s a fragment.
PK,
Is too a sentence. When you strip off the subordinate clauses, it comes down to:
“The Tuesday morning air reeked.”
I remember being caught in that non-moment midway between dawn and sunrise. It happened when the starship USS (like there will still be a US when a Federation of Planets exists) Enterprise did the slingshot thingy around the sun in Star Trek IV and came back to the 1990s. I was twenty something then, and I hung in a partially sunny, but not, limbo until those spacefreaks left. I returned to the normal continuum in that non-moment midway between sunset and dusk.
Hmmm. “The Tuesday morning air reeked.” sounds like a half-decent opening line…
It short and sweet. Leaves the reader wondering why the air reeked. One might go to the second sentence to try to find out more.
To apply one of my favorite pieces of Menckeniana to this:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from etc …
I first met Dean …
First lines are deceptive in their origin.
Who knows where the spark comes from except inside … and then whatever the first line … when it works, it …