But then, on the topic of missing notes, she said something I hadn't considered before. She pointed out that it took considerable talent to intentionally miss every single note, because you'd have to know what the right note was, and then assiduously avoid it, while singing another note, preferably a real clunker. She was right. Try it sometime.
The same can be true of writing. One of my grad school mentors was a terrific Maine author and playwright named Mike Kimball, and he once wrote a humorous story about squirrels, intentionally missing every note when it came to writing craft.
The room was filled at the reading, mostly MFA students and faculty, and we hadn't recovered from the last belly laugh before the next came. He crushed it. Most of the clunkers were because the prose was so over the top, and so repetitive in its repeating of what had already been said...plus throw in rodent love...
Anyway, there is an event called the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest which is looking to award a small prize for the worst opening line. Known to many as the "Dark and Stormy Night" contest, it's run by San Jose State University, and writers attempt to miss all the notes while crafting a horrible opener, and then submit it.
The contest is named for the novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, author of the well known first line, "It was a dark and stormy night," from his 1830 novel Paul Clifford. Snoopy, when he was crafting his novel, often used it.
The whole of that stinker of an opener goes, "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."
P-U, but the contest attracts over ten thousand entrants annually, and has been broken into subcats like mystery, romance, western, YA, etc.
There comes a point when one more stroke of the brush diminishes the painting. Bulwer-Lytton took a roller to his painting in the opening line.
It's important to be detail-oriented when writing, but in my opinion it's hugely important to be economical as well, and to trust the reader for Heaven's sake. Let the reader do some of the work, which sounds like a fortune cookie at a writing seminar, but it's true.
For fun, here are some of the winners and runners-up from a recent Bulwer-Lytton contest:
2020 Grand Prize - Lisa Kluber, San Francisco, CA
Her Dear John missive flapped unambiguously in the windy breeze, hanging like a pizza menu on the doorknob of my mind.
2020 Crime & Detective category winner - Yale Abrams, Santa Rosa, CA
When she walked into my office on that bleak December day, she was like a breath of fresh air in a coal mine; she made my canary sing.
2020 Romance category winner - Julie Winspear, Washington D.C.
In Gertrude’s experience lovemaking was always bittersweet, or at least it had been until one fateful night when Chaz, the seductive man behind the concession stand blessed her with the salty-sweet bliss reminiscent of both true romance and quality kettle corn.
2020 Historical Fiction category winner- Edward Covolo, Menlo Park, CA
When Sir John of York fought in the crusades, he killed many Saracens with great dispatch, and was likened unto a whirling dervish of steel and Christian might—minus the dizziness from constantly spinning in a circle, and the fact that he was on a horse that couldn't do that.
Here's my advice. Just write, in as natural a voice as you can. Don't try to sound like someone you once heard, but you were reading, so it was the voice in your head, or one of them, with words being put in its mouth by another writer.
Relax, and write.
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