The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

"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."

So begins Paul Clifford, by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, largely regarded to be the single worst opening line in literature. In honor of this, the first legitimate use of the phrase: "it was a dark and stormy night;" is the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a battle for the worst first line of a story.

Since 1983, writers all over have vied for the title. It is people like them who are responsible for this:

The bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two, the first half being before the scream when it was fairly balmy and calm and pleasant for those who hadn't heard the scream at all, but not calm or balmy or even very nice for those who did hear the scream, discounting the little period of time during the actual scream itself when your ears might have been hearing it but your brain wasn't reacting yet to let you know.

Or this:

The moment he laid eyes on the lifeless body of the nude socialite sprawled across the bathroom floor, Detective Leary knew she had committed suicide by grasping the cap on the tamper-proof bottle, pushing down and twisting while she kept her thumb firmly pressed against the spot the arrow pointed to, until she hit the exact spot where the tab clicks into place, allowing her to remove the cap and swallow the entire contents of the bottle, thus ending her life.

Or even this:

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.

Glorious. They also do genres. For example, the sci-fi runner-up:

Racing through space at unimaginable speeds, Capt. Dimwell could only imagine how fast his spaceship was going.

Classic. Check it out here.