It was a dark and stormy night … for bad writing
“She was a beautiful woman; more specifically she was the kind of beautiful woman who had an hourlong skincare routine that made her look either ethereal or like a glazed donut, depending on how attracted to her you were.”
That sentence, written by Maya Pasic of New York City, won the Grand Prize in the 2023 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
As a past category winner, I got an email a few weeks ago alerting me to the fact that the 2023 champions had been announced. I didn’t enter anything this year, but it was a helpful reminder that I’m months overdue for opening up our own 12th sort-of-annual edition of Bulwer-Lytton literary mayhem.
I started doing this in 2006, so clearly, there have been gaps, including the one created by my retirement as a regular columnist in 2018. After I began freelancing, I revived the local contest in 2020 as a diversion while the pandemic left us sheltered at home.
San Jose State University has been conducting its international contest for decades. It pays tribute to Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton and this immortal opening line: “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 real contest and my pale imitation challenge writers to create the first sentence of the worst possible novel. I often bill it as a bad writing contest, but it takes a good writer to create a winning entry.
As it happens, we have a lot of them in the Lehigh Valley. Although I found no local winners in the 2023 results, we’ve done very well there over the years. I also typically receive entries from other places, including
one particularly prolific bad-sentence writer who never has won our contest but always is represented in the real Bulwer-Lytton results. He’s Andrew Lundberg of Los Angeles, whose name appeared a whopping five times in the 2023 list of winners.
Here was my favorite of those, which got a Dishonorable Mention in the Western category:
“The cowpoke’s lot — lonely nights on the prairie, strange saloons with stranger trade, weeks on end away from the home where the heart is — had its undeniable drawbacks, but there was a romantic simplicity to driving fifty head of Angus to market across the Great Plains that paid it all back, mused Pete McLaughlin as he notched his cabover Peterbilt into tenth gear, cranked up the
Bob Seger, and settled in for nine hours on the I-70 to St Louis.”
Here’s one more of this year’s winners, which captured the Vile Puns category.
Adam Chmelka of Olathe, Kansas, wrote: “While she had no regrets about throwing the lever to douse her husband’s mistress in molten gold, Blanche did feel a pang of conscience for the innocent bystanders whose proximity had caused them to suffer gilt by association.”
I encourage you to check out the bulwer-lytton.com website for all the winners. It’s great fun.
One mistake beginners at this often make is to assume it’s a long sentence contest. Some winning entries have meandered, but I’m more often drawn to sentences that feature creative use of odd
subject matter and language, many times ending with a humorous twist.
Still, I’m not the final word. I eventually will submit the best of your entries to a panel of judges whose votes will determine the winners.
There’s no limit to how many you can submit. In fact, last year’s winner, Kent Simendinger, took three of the top four places.
This was his winning entry: “Thoughts of love at first sight and opposites attract lingered in the air (along with Axe body spray), in the crowded high school hallway, and with an inadvertent bump, Kevin’s tattered copy of ‘Beowulf ’ and Maria’s dog-eared ‘Jane Eyre’ tumbled to the floor, their eyes meeting briefly as they failed to correctly
grab their own tomes while hearing clarion bells ringing, for fifth period, leading not to passion but to overdue library fines as their lockers became dusty tombs of unspoken, forgotten words.”
I hope you’ll accept our challenge this year. Submit your one-sentence entry or entries to my email address below. There’s no great rush, since this tends to drag out over a period of months and I expect to prompt you with more past winners in future columns, but if you’re feeling inspired, by all means hit me right away with your best worst efforts.
I think you’ll find it’s fun to write them.