Funny Terrible Bad Opening Paragraphs of Novels

[runemanqwe]

The McCain boys strode off proudly to fight in the Civil War, one for the Union and one for the Confederacy, neither of them giving a single thought to who would play them in the television movie of their story, which would be decided more than a hundred years later by 20-something casting agents who kept getting the Civil War and World War II mixed up.


When Debbie decided that Salt ‘n’ Pepper Beard was the most attractive pirate on the ship, she realized that choosing him was due to the advice of Sylvia, her new Life Coach, to be realistic about her own age and to open herself up to romance where it lay, unlike the troublesome past where she would have wished that only the younger pirates take advantage of her.


The king’s men breathed heavily under their thick black hoods as they secured the wrists and ankles of prisoner William Tumey of Kent and as the rack’s handle began to turn the ropes tightened and William’s limbs were slowly stretched in opposite directions until his spine began to pop much like a bag of Redenbachers in a microwave and for something like the time it takes a hummingbird’s wings to complete one cycle William smiled and euphorically languished in perfect lumbar alignment.

A single sparkling tear fell from Little Mary’s cheek onto the sidewalk, then slid into the storm drain, there to join in its course the mighty waters of the Los Angeles River and, eventually, Long Beach Harbor, with its state-of-the-art container-freight processing facilities.


Lisa moved like a cat, not the kind of cat that moves with a slinky grace but more like the kind that always falls off the book shelf when he’s washing himself and then gets all mad at you like it’s your fault (which it wasn’t although it probably was kind of mean to laugh at him like that), although on the bright side, she hardly ever attacked Ricky’s toes in his sleep.


He rose quickly when she entered, not like the flag being raised at the American Legion in a jerky fashion, but more like the light red Creme Soda in the straw of a teenage girl or boy on the back porch of his mobile home late in the evening.