A Story That Begins 'It Was a Dark and Stormy Night': Model Answer and Notes
Quick answer: An original 180-word exam story continuing It was a dark and stormy night, set in a Rajasthan dust storm, with notes on why it scores and how to outrun the cliche.
'It was a dark and stormy night' is the most famous opening line in English and the most mocked, which is exactly why examiners set it: they want to see whether you can make something real follow a cliche. Copy the line exactly, then make the second sentence specific to a place and a person, and let the storm cause the plot rather than decorate it. The model below is about 180 words and moves the storm to a village in Rajasthan, where it is dust rather than rain.
The line was written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1830 and has been a joke for a century. You cannot avoid the joke; you can only outrun it with a concrete second sentence.
The task
Typical wording: 'Begin your story with the following line and complete it in 150 to 200 words: It was a dark and stormy night.' Copy the line word for word as your first sentence. Decide what the storm does to your character before writing the second.
Model answer
The Goats. It was a dark and stormy night. In Khejarli that meant dust, not rain: a wall of it coming off the desert so thick that Bhanu could not see the neem tree at the end of the yard, and the lamp in the kitchen burned brown. His mother pulled the shutters. His father counted the goats.
There were eleven. There should have been fourteen. Three had broken the pen when the wind hit and were somewhere out in the dark, and his father, who had a bad knee, stood at the door with a scarf across his face and did not go.
Bhanu went. He got as far as the well before he understood that he could not see his own hands, and he stood there with sand in his teeth, wondering how to go back, when a torch beam found him.
It was Kesar Singh from the next house, the man his father had not spoken to since the dispute over the boundary wall, and he had three goats on a rope. He handed Bhanu the rope, said nothing, and walked back into the storm. In the morning Bhanu's father went next door. That was the end of the dispute.
Why it earns marks
Against content, organisation and expression:
Three other ways to take the same topic
Each makes the second sentence concrete. Writory's monthly short story contest, open from age 13, scores every entry out of 100, and a cliche opening costs nothing there if the second sentence does real work.
What writers can take from this
- Copy the line exactly; do not improve it.
- Make the second sentence name a place and a person.
- Let the storm cause the problem, not decorate it.
- Show the dark by what cannot be seen.
- Plant one human conflict the storm can resolve.
- After the given line, write no more adjectives about weather.
Try it yourself
Begin a 180-word story with 'It was a dark and stormy night' and make the second sentence contradict the reader's expectation of what kind of storm it is: heat, dust, snow, or a storm that is only in one room.
Questions
Do I have to use the exact line 'It was a dark and stormy night'?
Yes, word for word, as your first sentence. Examiners check it under content. You may not paraphrase it or begin with a title sentence before it; the title goes above, the given line comes first.
Can I write the dark and stormy night story in the first person?
Yes. The given line is in the third person but does not name a character, so 'I' can enter in the second sentence. Keep the past tense throughout.
Should the story have a moral?
Only if asked. The model above could take 'A storm can end a feud faster than years of talk', but the father going next door already says it.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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