To this reader, the best writing competition, bar none, is the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest...for an opening sentence so bad it’s funny.
Our whimsical literary competition honors Sir Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel Paul Clifford begins with “It was a dark and stormy night.”
www.bulwer-lytton.com
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The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is a parodic fiction contest started in 1982 by Professor Scott E. Rice of the English Department at San Jose State University, the goal of which is to write the worst possible opening sentence for a novel.
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But who was Bulwer-Lytton?
Edward Bulwer-Lytton...is the 19th-century English novelist whose works include the florid and forgettable The Last Days of Pompeii and the line “It was a dark and stormy night,” best known today as the start of Snoopy’s endless tries at fiction writing.
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The Inspiration for the Contest
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.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford
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The 2023 Grand Prize Winner
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.
Maya Pasic, New York, NY
And here are some winners in other categories, all from 2023:
Grand Panjandrum’s Special Award
It was a sunny day in Los Angeles, hot and bright, and I was in my office, playing Mahjong against myself and losing, when she walked in, 120 pounds of dynamite, a blonde with legs that began at her ankles and ended in trouble. --Daniel Bradford, Lexington, KY
Crime & Detective
The tall, slender seductress had Tom Pauley wrapped around her little finger, and she had James McGee hanging from a necklace, but the police were still waiting for the lab results to determine whose body parts she had used to make her earrings and that stunning tennis bracelet.
Julian Calvin, Atlanta, GA
Dark & Stormy
Time was passing as slow as a snail on Valium as I waited on this dark and stormy night, for the taxi I called, that would probably never come to this wretched street where the waterfront serial killer had, in the past year, strangled nine women, two cats and a parrot, but that is another story.
Fred Mason, Evansville, IN
Historical Fiction
None of the soldiers, their reddened faces wet from boutonnière squirts, their bodies covered in feathers hurled from buckets, wanted to admit the 102nd Clown Infantry Division had routed them at the Battle of Little Big Top.
Brent Guernsey, Springfield, VA
Science Fiction
Her mind racing through the hasty protocol briefing she’d received shortly before launch fourteen months ago, Commander Winona Bengston, the first Earther to lead a delegation to the Nardoz system, regarded the alien commander who was now undressing her with his eyes, which wouldn’t have been that big a deal except that, his being Nardozian, the officer’s four eyes were ten feet long, and prehensile.
G. Andrew Lundberg, Los Angeles, CA
Romance
It was love at first sight—he was tall and broad-shouldered, with a dimpled smile, twinkling green eyes, and in keeping with his combination of statistically unlikely but deeply alluring features, type AB blood, and that condition where cilantro tastes like soap.
Ananya Benegal, St. Louis, MO
Vile Puns
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.
Adam Chmelka, Olathe, KS
Purple Prose
She was just like Greta, who’d poisoned her family, burned down my house, bombed six countries, and used a gun on anyone she wanted: short.
Frederick Ankowski, Santa Monica, CA
Source for the winners.
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Wishing you a wonderful day!