Bad writing contest winner hooks us with fishing pun
t was a dark and stormy night, if by “dark” one meant a dungeon-like, suffocating pall of shadow and still deeper shadow unpunctuated by so much as a hint of moonlight or the merest twinkle of a distant star, and by “stormy” you referred to the sort of restless, bitter, resentful turmoil that a night might evince were it a woman scorned; but if not, then it was a night of intermittent heavy rain, with winds gusting to 30 miles per hour out of the northwest, temperatures dipping to the low 50s in the basin and the high 40s at the beaches, sunrise coming at 6:23, and a small-craft advisory remaining in effect until noon.
That entry, by Andy
Lundberg of Los Angeles, was not the winner of this year’s local version of the
Bulwer-Lytton writing contest. But it tied for second place.
Lundberg, my only contestant outside Pennsylvania — I won’t say the Lehigh Valley, because I also had an entry from Potter County — bombarded me with 26 sentences. When I thanked him for entering again, he responded:
“It was that or do a few loads of laundry, so ...” This eighth annual local contest challenges readers to write the first sentence of the worst possible novel. It spun off from the real BulwerLytton Fiction Contest run for years by San Jose State University.
The contest is named for Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who began a novel with a classic sentence that started, “It was a dark and stormy night ...” I encourage you to visit the website, which is great fun.
The top two finishers were scheduled to receive copies of “Untethered: Sweet, Strange and Funny Tales of the Paranormal,” the latest short story anthology from the Bethlehem Writers Group. I’ve just finished reading it, and it’s terrific, as have been the group’s other collections.
Since we had a tie for second, I decided to throw in another of their books, “Once Upon a Time: Sweet, Funny, and Strange Tales for All Ages,” for one of the runners-up.
If you check my blog over the next several days, you can find all the submissions that received votes. Today, I’ll share a couple of my favorites before getting to the other runner-up and this year’s champion, our first repeat winner.
My first attempt to win the real Bulwer-Lytton competition, many years ago, had a cannibalism theme. Perhaps this explains my affection for this entry, which I ranked fourth but which drew no other votes. It didn’t hurt that it also plays off a familiar Grammar Police joke. It’s by Jill Silvius:
“Little did 3-year-old Eliza know, as the sun peeked over the mountains of the Sierra Nevada that chilly Thanksgiving morning in 1846, that her family’s fame would come, neither from their snowman-building propensity nor their fierce pioneering spirit, but from their lack of knowledge of the nuances of punctuation when, immediately after her grandmother’s cheery dinnertime announcement, “Let’s eat, folks!,” members of the Donner family would turn to each other with both ravenous hunger and utter confusion and sink their teeth into each other’s thin forearms.”
I also liked this one, which earned one first-place vote and a fourth. It was written by former contest runner-up Steve Lauducci:
“Phyllis surveyed the scene contentedly: the wine was poured, the candles glowed warmly, and the chicken sat on the serving dish, groggy from when Phyllis had whacked it with a skillet so she could finish incanting the words that would summon Thulmnuctha from the nethermost depths to wreak destruction on the leafy avenues of Elmwood Lakes after a tasty, though — and the thought brought a slight crease of frown to the corners of her eyes — sure to be messy dinner.”
Former winner Ron Pizarie tied Andy Lundberg for second and received one first-place vote. Here was his entry:
“It was twilight, that irreversible moment of a waning evening, when the last sliver of solar illumination loses its grip in an astronomical struggle to survive above the horizon, only to suddenly slip into darkness under nature’s grip of planetary rotation, and hen-pecked Lester Brimford is running across his yard to hide his rake or face the wrath of his wife, who is arriving home earlier than expected, and who will once again mercilessly berate him for raking the fallen autumn leaves in the darkness of night, which he enjoys doing while wearing his handed down coal miner’s hat with a battery operated light on top.”
Puns were involved in two of this year’s top entries. The first, written by Tony Emery, involves a rarely-heard-today expression drawn from “Gone With the Wind.” This sentence was the only one to finish first on two judges’ ballots, placing it fourth overall:
“As our story begins our hero, Oscar Fiddle, is entering Yale Divinity School hoping that an advanced degree in theology will ease the taunting that he has long suffered because of his surname, little realizing the humiliation that awaits him upon graduation: He will be thenceforth be known as O. Fiddle, D.D.”