“She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-pound ham-hock tossed from a speeding truck.”
That sentence, submitted by Lawrence Person of Austin, Texas, was the Grand Prize Winner in this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. That renowned international event, run for decades by San Jose State University, recognizes the first sentence of the worst possible novel. Its namesake is Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote this immortal first sentence of his novel “Paul Clifford”:
“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
The international contest actually includes a “Dark and Stormy” category to pay special homage to Bulwer-Lytton. This year’s winner there was Owen Roherty of Colborne, Canada, who wrote:
“It was a dark and stormy night, or more specifically, a Tuesday afternoon in Ireland.”
Today marks my 13th sort-of-annual attempt to replicate the contest with a local competition. Our area is blessed with a lot of talented bad writers, and we’ve done well in the international contest over the years – I’m a two-time place winner, and we’ve had many others who are regulars in my contest — although none of us placed this year.
There was a familiar name there, though. Andrew Lundberg, a Los Angeles writer who typically sends me a raft of sentences and is a place winner in our local contest, was recognized several times again this year in the real Bulwer-Lytton competition.
This winner of the Historical Fiction category was my favorite of his sentences recognized in the San Jose contest this year:
“On an otherwise fine spring morning, Helga Tottentanz learned in an exceptionally hard way that, whatever they might’ve told you in hospitality school up in Cologne, as a serving wench in Mainz’s finest inn in 451 A.D., you don’t greet a battle-weary and obviously stressed general named Attila, fresh from crossing the Carpathians at the cost of ten thousand or so men, with an overly cheery Hi, Hun.”
You can find all their winners past and present at the website bulwer-lytton.com.
I often bill our competition as a bad writing contest, but it actually takes a good writer to craft a winning sentence. And as you’ll see from their Grand Prize winner, it’s not about just writing a long, convoluted sentence. When I’m judging our entries, I’m more likely to zero in on those with creative subject matter, unusual imagery and some kind of humorous twist.
Here is another example, this year’s Grand Panjandrum’s Special Award winner by Joel Phillips of West Trenton, New Jersey.
“Mrs. Higgins’ body was found in the pantry, bludgeoned with a potato ricer and lying atop a fifty-pound sack of Yukon golds, her favorite for making gnocchi, though some people consider them too moist for this purpose.”
My contest is likely to drag on until late this year, and I’ll run at least one more column featuring past local and international winners to encourage entrants and offer examples of what we’re looking for.
Still, I encourage you to get started now. You can submit as many first sentences as you like, so make it a weekly exercise. I’ll eventually winnow the entrants down to the best 25-30 and then submit them to a not-particularly-distinguished panel of judges who will choose the winners.
Kent Simendinger became the first three-time champion in our contest last year with this great sentence:
“The boisterous party was well underway when Alex espied her ex walking in, gliding across the room like a vintage turntable tonearm tracking across a familiar, well-worn and warped record, full of hisses and pops with the same warbled lyric hiccupping over and over again until it suddenly hopped the glaring deep gouge across track 3, once their song, settling into a pitted groove while her heart skipped a beat with the sonic flood of bittersweet liner note memories, until she realized it was just her A-fib flaring up again and that she always hated that album.”
I consider my first place in the international contest’s Western Category several years ago, inspired in part by you in the Grammar Police, to be one of the greatest moments in my professional career. Here it is:
“Baking under the blazing New Mexico sun as he stood in the dusty street outside the saloon, Old West certified public accountant Arthur W. Fetterman Jr. hovered his sweaty hand over the butt of his borrowed six-gun, advanced another reluctant step toward famed gunfighter John Wesley Hardin and wondered for the hundredth time what had possessed him to correct the man’s use of “supposably” during their poker game.”
I’ll close with another shorter winner in this year’s real contest, in the Vile Pun category. It was submitted by A.R. Templeton of Stratford, Canada:
“I do enjoy turning a prophet,” said Torquemada, as he roasted the heretic seer on a spit.”
Inspired? Then get to work.
Bill White can be reached at whitebil1974@gmail.com.
