The sun rolled slowly, like a fiery fur ball coughed up uneasily onto a sky blue carpet by some giant unseen cat.

This is but one of hundreds of the best worst opening sentences that San Jose State University professor Scott Rice has collected over the past twenty-five years. Rice is the creator of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which collects and judges some of the most pretentious, over-the-top, inadvertently hilarious sentences ever written in English. He has collected some of them in a volume titled It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, named after the now infamous first line, penned originally by Mr. Bulwer-Lytton himself.

Listen to the full interview here, and take solace in the fact that the first line of your novel isn’t nearly so bad.