Sometimes I sit at happy hours all by myself and write. Over the years I've been culling my notebooks for the most awful possible opening lines for fiction pieces. I do a great deal of questioning, and kind of why am I here? writing, so just by putting these down in a list, it's possible to get a sense of what's going on.
A big problem with this self-criticism is: it doesn't help at all in answering the following two questions...
- Can I write fiction?
- Can I write something that is not merely a complaint?
Here they are. The worst opening lines from bad journal-based fiction:
"When I was seventeen, I left home for good..."
"Never think you can get away with lying to yourself..."
Let me tell you son, I've seen a lot of life."
"As soon as I realized how I'd wasted the last ten years of my life..."
"Nothing is easy. Especially for me..."
"It must have been the sixth -- or seventh -- margarita..."
"She was the girl who was always wanting to eat the cherry from my whiskey sours."
"Even though there was an eleven year difference in our ages..."
"I believed her completely that there's nothing worse in her eyes than being needy."
"If you're going to make something up on the spur of the moment, it had better be right on the money
."
"She said she hated her crappy retail job, and aspired to be a stop-motion animator."
"A month before she moved with him to Portland, she assured me she wasn't sure they had a future together."
"If only I'd met her younger sister first..."
"I'd fooled myself into thinking she couldn't really be all that dumb..."
"It was supposed to be casual... She says to this day she always held my best interests above her needs."
"This just seems like the break-up talk again."
"Could I call you sometime?
Are you sure??"
"I bought you this pen..."
"It's Better to Regret Something You HAVE Done..., than to regret something you haven't done."
"What was I trying to hide from...???"
"... and then I married her."