It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Remember George Bulwer-Lytton?  He started his 1830 novel Paul Clifford with that famous sentence: It was a dark and stormy night.

How much fun it would be, thought I, to see what I could do with that line.  I added a drill sentence, stressing the SH sounds, from Grant Fairbanks Voice and Articulation Drillbook, 1940, A flash of lightening showed a fishing ship in the shallows close to shore. In one great crushing motion the ocean dashed it against the shoal.

Voila, I had the start of a novel.  And I gushed on for 1622 words more.  Wow, Karen, I have started a novel.  All I need to do is do that 22 more times and then run to my publisher.

My novel starts thus:

It was a dark and stormy night. A flash of lightening showed a fishing ship in the shallows close to the shoal. With one great crushing motion, the ocean sent it crashing onto the shore.

The horrified watchers gasped in horror as the cabin collapsed and shattered, but three figures in rain slickers could be seen clambering free of the wreckage. The three leaped into the waist deep water and started for shore.

The receding wave tugged at the three as they struggled forward against the current barely keeping their feet, and the hulk of the ship began sliding back into the sea. Some of the watchers ran forward into the water and helped the three on to the dry sand.

Safely ashore the three all began a strange behavior: they began laughing, all three in seeming concert.

One of the three was woman in her fifties. She shouted, apparently at the ocean, “Dry sand. This is dry sand we are on. You didn’t get us, and now you can’t. Furious you are, aren’t you? But we’re on the land.”

Another of the three, a man, told the rescuers, “A few minutes ago we were lost. Only yards from shore, we were lost, and the boat was breaking up. We were dying, a few minutes ago. We were doomed, but now, here we are on dry land.”

“Come inside,” said the rescuers leading the trio into a cabin.

“No, wait,’ exclaimed the woman. “I’m not through.” She faced the ocean again and threw off her rain slicker. She was bare. “See. See what you missed, you miserable beast, you lying bastard” She turned and strode into the cabin naked. “Have you got some clothes I could borrow,” she asked as casually as if requesting tea and crumpets.