It was a dark and stormy night

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by taming

It was a dark and stormy night is also the opening line in Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 kids' classic A Wrinkle in Time.

Brilliant.

[bfisher]

I just started John Fowles The French Lieutenant's Woman.

The opening line:

"An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay ..."

I'm at page 58 and still have not seen a connection to the main story.

[Mike L]

And wasn't it a theme in that excellent film, Throw Momma from the Train, where it was used as a metaphor for all clichéd opening sentences?

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by Mike L

And wasn't it a theme in that excellent film, Throw Momma from the Train, where it was used as a metaphor for all clichéd opening sentences?

Sweet.

I can just barely remember the movie (a Danny DeVito character recruiting a Billy Crystal character to murder his mother), something to do with a writing class? Thanks, I must look at the movie again.

[bfisher]

I hadn't known that there is a writing contest to compose the worse opening line. The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest - http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/index.html

[Mike L]

Originally Posted by bfisher

I can just barely remember the movie (a Danny DeVito character recruiting a Billy Crystal character to murder his mother), something to do with a writing class? Thanks, I must look at the movie again.

The thing I remember best is that the Billy Chrystal character was stuck on the opening line of his novel, and finally settled for something like "it was a dark and stormy night" or some version of that.

The next day, he's teaching his writing class, and he asks the Danny DeVito character to read his latest story. But he's devestated to hear that DeVito opens with "it was a humid night", to which Crystal utters a line that stuck in my memory: "Class dismissed. I've got a headache in my eye."

Mike