Wretched Writers Welcome

There exists somewhere in the dark and stormy universe a contest in which wretched writers contend for the most-awful-first-line-of-a-novel-ever award.

An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for “The Last Days of Pompeii” (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and phrases like “the great unwashed” and “the almighty dollar,” Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the “Peanuts” beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Here are some of my favorites:
“The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor—the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn’t use more than twice, but you do; but Trevor Earp had to face it as he started the second morning of his hopeless search for Drover, the Irish Wolfhound he had found as a pup near death from a fight with a prairie dog and nursed back to health, stolen by a traveling circus so that the monkey would have something to ride.”

“The appearance of a thin red beam of light under my office door and the sound of one, then two pair of feet meant my demise was near, that my journey from gum-shoe detective to international agent had gone horribly wrong, until I realized it was my secretary teasing her cat with a laser pointer.”

“Like an expensive sports car, fine-tuned and well-built, Portia was sleek, shapely, and gorgeous, her red jumpsuit molding her body, which was as warm as the seatcovers in July, her hair as dark as new tires, her eyes flashing like bright hubcaps, and her lips as dewy as the beads of fresh rain on the hood; she was a woman driven—fueled by a single accelerant—and she needed a man, a man who wouldn’t shift from his views, a man to steer her along the right road, a man like Alf Romeo.”

Read more from the winners (losers) of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest here.

Comments

[That Guy]

I disagree completely. I think its great writing practice. And as an English Major I have participated in the program and I believe that it's great. Just because there are some bad novels written does that discount all of the good ones? I see a flaw in your evidence as well. In your criticism, you've noted the bad without giving any evidence of the good things that the program does. Some of these include: allowing writers to practice their writing skills, developing arguments and formats for future novels, and allowing them to practice their critical thinking and time management skills, to name just a few. The program also gets thousands of participants every year, sparking interest in literature from both the young and the old, and keeping alive a rich American culture of novel writing by people not deemed professionals.

Therefore, are you willing to accept the bad if some good is created?

[Sister Faulkner]

it would be great if cows identified themselves when poring over our website.