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The Lyttle Lytton Contest
- berbec 7y agoThis is especially bad when compared to a great first sentance: "The man in Black fled across the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed." - (Steven King, 1982 "The Gunslinger") [1] 1: https://litreactor.com/columns/the-top-10-best-opening-lines-of-novels https://litreactor.com/columns/the-top-10-best-opening-lines...
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoMaybe there should be a contest to turn great first sentences into Lyton worthy bad sentences. The man in Black ambulated with passion across the Desert, and the Gunslinger said I'm gonna do that too.
- smacktoward 7y agoMy given appellation, which I hereby grant permission to you and any other interested parties to use when speaking in reference to me, is Ishmael.
- smrq 7y agoIt was the best of times--no, wait, the worst--well, maybe both at the same time.
- asark 7y agoEveryone knows rich single dudes wanna get hitched.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoAt 13:00 hrs the weather was normal for April.
- dredds 7y agoThe Book, Alpha 0: The Entity created everythingness from nondescript nothingness, and as with contemporary cosmology, this was as good a place to start as any other. A place for life.
- lmitchell 7y agoThis feels spectacularly Pratchett-esque. I would not be surprised to see this as the first sentence of a Discworld novel :P
- Swizec 7y agoI don’t think anything’s ever going to beat Thompson’s “We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold”
- berbec 7y agoAnd we'll need the cocaine
- baddox 7y agoI don't understand why that sentence is always mentioned as a notably good opening sentence on its own. If it wasn't written by Steven King in a book that's considered to be good, would anyone really identify the sentence itself as a great opening sentence? Of course I don't think there's anything wrong with it as an opening sentence, I just don't see how it's notable.
- mdemare 7y agoI fed that sentence to GPT-2 last month. Brilliant: The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed. There was talk of trying to track down a mysterious man who, if not a gun, could be a helpful ally. For a moment, the two could not be sure. The Man in Black was not the same man they had met at the end of the night. But he could be a friend. As the Man went through the desert and into the darkness of the unknown, he left the gunslinger behind. The gunslinger was in the middle of a trail of shattered bricks. The Man went away. "Man in Black," said the Gunslinger. "Gunslinger," said the Man in Black.
- rcombine 7y agoMore specifically, Lyttle Lytton is about writing that first sentence within a particular word count.
- duskwuff 7y agoIn response to the Bulwer-Lytton contest [1], which -- in the opinion of some -- has been flooded with excessively wordy entries. 1: https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/ https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoLet me see if I can remember my (unsubmitted) entry for that: "He was a dork, and Stormy Knight suddenly shot the ring right out of his fingers, because she was tired of dorks, especially the kind of dork who automatically assumed that she'd marry him, even though he was a dork and she was the kind of girl who could shoot the ring out of a man's hand, hitting nothing but the ring and maybe a few miscellaneous bits of fingertip." (Playing with the "It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly a shot rang out" trope...)
- jessriedel 7y agoPreviously 25 words, now 200 characters.
- Symmetry 7y agoIf they weren't you might get something like Night had come to the city of Skalandarharia, the sort of night with such a quality of black to it that it was as if black coal had been wrapped in blackest velvet, bathed in the purple-black ink of the demon squid Drindel and flung down a black well that descended toward the deepest, blackest crevasses of Drindelthengen, the netherworld ruled by Drindel, in which the sinful were punished, the black of which was so legendarily black that when the dreaded Drindelthengenflagen, the ravenous blind black badger trolls of Drindelthengen, would feast upon the uselessly dilated eyes of damned, the abandoned would cry out in joy as the Drindelthengenflagenmorden, the feared Black Spoons of the Drindelthengenflagen, pressed against their optic nerves, giving them one last sensation of light before the most absolute blackness fell upon them, made yet even blacker by the injury sustained from a falling lump of ink-bathed, velvet-wrapped coal. Which, yes, is deliberate parody. https://www.tor.com/2011/04/01/the-shadow-war-of-the-night-dragons-book-one-the-dead-city-excerpt/ https://www.tor.com/2011/04/01/the-shadow-war-of-the-night-d...
- jonnycomputer 7y agoOn the other hand, George R.R. Martin's first sentence of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is amazingly pithy; I was admiring it last night: "The spring rains had softened the ground, so Dunk had no trouble digging the grave."
- johnhenry 7y agoUsing this in conjunction with GPT-2 (https://github.com/openai/gpt-2 https://github.com/openai/gpt-2) to make full stories out of these sentences should be fun. Update: It's at least "interesting" if not fun; here's a story generated from the 2019 winner using the GPT-2's medium sized model https://pastebin.com/raw/hWn7DNEC https://pastebin.com/raw/hWn7DNEC
- asark 7y agoThere are several really good sentences and/or writing prompts hiding in that gibberish.
- throwaway3627 7y agoGiven the advances in AI/ML, there oughta be a Harlequin romance novel generator.
- alejohausner 7y agoPerhaps my favourite best first sentence: Bother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast in the desert. From "A Canticle for Liebowitz"
- sonofhans 7y agoI knew what this was as soon as I read "Brother Francis." This sentence is indeed a fitting counter-example to Lyttle Lyton. The whole book is beautifully crafted.
- asark 7y agoI write this as someone who loves that book: that sentence is exactly the sort the editor/judge of the contest would probably classify as being kinda bad, yes, but also too likely to actually hook a reader to be a worthy entrant. "Brother Gerard of Utah", "might never have discovered", "blessed" paired with the humorously cold and vague "documents", "girded loins" (just inherently funny, not exactly bad), "that" being just far enough removed from its referent that it reads awkwardly. This all happens in part because (I'm pretty sure) it is supposed to read as kinda funny, because it's leaning into often-groan-worthy sci-fi tropes ("of Utah") but just happens to be one of the rare good books that does that, and because it is just a little less tightly-written than it might be. The combo's pretty amusing, but also too good for the contest.
- beat 7y agoAlong the SF lines, my favorite first line ever is: The sky over the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. From "Neuromancer", by William Gibson.
- jhbadger 7y agoAnd at least two more recent books followed that up with "It was bright blue", as that's what many modern digital TVs show rather than the grey analog static Gibson was referring to. I love Gibson's line, but it's the sort of thing that will need to be explained by a footnote the way Dickens' description of a ghost in "A Christmas Carol" as glowing "like a bad lobster in a dark cellar" is today.
- benj111 7y agoCommander B. G. Robinson is very feminine and graciously endowed: everything she has two of are perfectly matched, coordinated, and move with a wonderful grace that is called “woman.” Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Outrageous Okona” shooting script adapted by Harper Cole Someone obviously has a different idea of TNG than Gene Roddenberry. Edit: Link http://adamcadre.ac/18lyttle.html http://adamcadre.ac/18lyttle.html
- floathub 7y agoSubjective it may be, but the greatest opening line in all of literature is surely: "The beet is the most intense of vegetables." From Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins.
- pg_bot 7y agoI'll counter with "It was the day my grandmother exploded." From The Crow Road by Iain Banks
- phillc73 7y agoWhich Hemingway would you like? You know how it is there early in the morning in Havana with the bums still asleep against the walls of the buildings; before even the ice wagons come by with ice for the bars? - To Have and Have Not He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. - The Old Man and the Sea Then there was the bad weather. - A Moveable Feast In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plains to the mountains. - A Farewell to Arms Robert Cohn was once the middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. - Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises Each one of those opening sentences asks more questions. Is that really what it was like in Havana? Why hasn't he caught fish for so long? Where was the weather bad? Which river, plains and mountains? Why did his boxing career stop at Princeton? I do enjoy Hemingway, but especially I find his opening lines compelling.
- svieira 7y agoI prefer: "The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up." ~ The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G. K. Chesterton http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0605571h.html http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0605571h.html
- beat 7y agoI remember an entry from 2003 that wasn't a winner, but has stuck in my mind ever since... and maybe you'll see why. It was a dark and stormy night. The rain plastered the cheap dress enticingly to my thigh as I bent to peel the still-warm gum from the sidewalk."
- riffraff 7y agoI don't even have to think about it: "That branch of the Lake of Como, which turns toward the south between two unbroken chains of mountains, presenting to the eye a succession of bays and gulfs, formed by their jutting and retiring ridges, suddenly contracts itself between a headland to the right and an extended sloping bank on the left, and assumes the flow and appearance of a river." That's the beginning of "I Promessi Sposi" (The Bethrothed) which is one of the most important books of italian literature, and IMO has one of the worst incipits ever written. And I feel the 1834 english version[0] is actually more readable than the original. [0] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35155/35155-h/35155-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35155/35155-h/35155-h.htm
- Balgair 7y agoFor other HNers out there: I Promessi Sposi really is a great book. If you are looking for something to read this summer, I'd really reccomend it.
- riffraff 7y agoYes it is, it's just the start of it is a wall of long descriptive convoluted sentences which feels very off putting to modern sensibilities.
- angel_j 7y agoAny sentence with parenthesis in it.
- Lerc 7y agoI recently listened to this https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0128pyh https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0128pyh I found it quite enlightening to see some of the thought that goes into an opening sentence.
- igravious 7y agoYou'll maybe want to start with this year: http://adamcadre.ac/19lyttle.html http://adamcadre.ac/19lyttle.html This one got me, “The shadowy figure stood alone in the rain on the street corner under the dim yellow streetlight, casting a long thin shadow down the alley perpendicular to him.” Perpendicular?
- vipbababd 7y agoOn the other hand, George R.R. Martin's first sentence of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is amazingly pithy; I was admiring it last night: "The spring rains had softened the ground, so Dunk had no trouble digging the grave."
- zimpenfish 7y ago"Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own." From the master of bad sentences himself, Dan Brown.
- davidmr 7y agoThat man has an absolutely unmatched gift for it. It’s genuinely impressive. https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/dont-make-fun-of-renowned-dan-brown/ https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/dont-make-f...
- throwaway66666 7y agoFrom 2014. ( http://adamcadre.ac/14lyttle.html http://adamcadre.ac/14lyttle.html ) "Obama chuckled. “You mean the Chaos Emeralds?”"
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y agoDidn't this article have a longer title originally? Is it me or have titles on HN been changing a lot more frequently than they used to, in the last few weeks?