Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

It was a bright and windy day in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and as I sat in the sticky heat of July, my knees pulling like taffy from the wooden picnic table bench, eating a ham sandwich I rescued from the cool cavern of a red Igloo cooler, I choked on my dry, mustard-y surprise when I heard the news -- I was sitting amongst a celebrity, of sorts.

Chris Wieloch, my boyfriend's father, very nonchalantly, as if merely commenting on the rapidity of the wind, told us that he was, indeed, the winner of the 2013 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. We all started with excitement, spitting our drinks out from our noses and tossing bits of cheese like confetti into the air. And then, we asked, "what's that?"

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is, to quote the website, "a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels". It has been in existence since 1982 and is the "Rosemary's baby", to quote the website again, of Professor Scott Rice. The contest draws thousands of contestants each year -- each with the hope of being chosen as the worst.

The idea behind the contest was inspired by the opening line to Edward George Bulwer-Lytton's novel that began "It was a dark and stormy night...", which is either an extremely nice compliment, or not. Many of the winning sentences are goofy, sarcastic, ridiculous, or successful because of a simple play on words. The more disgusting the sentence (yet tastefully disgusting, if there is such a thing), the better the sentence. For example, read Chris's sentence:

"She strutted into my office wearing a dress that clung to her like Saran Wrap to a sloppily butchered pork knuckle, bone and sinew jutting and lurching asymmetrically beneath its folds, the tightness exaggerating the granularity of the suet and causing what little palatable meat there was to sweat, its transparency the thief of imagination." — Chris Wieloch, Brookfield, WI

Most of the winning entries are bad, bad sentences, but, like Chris's sentence, it is written with persnickety exactness and wrapped up with a poetic metaphor that clinches just how awful the woman looks. In most cases, I presume, the winners of this contest are good writers in other areas of life, either professional or otherwise. It is difficult to manipulate the English language in order to induce such reactions like disgust and laughter from readers. This blog post, for example, the reader can tell that the writer is trying to be funny or silly, and yet, it falls short. Why is that? I'm hoping Chris will address this idea in a future blog post - successful comedic writing. Chris entered over 20 entries and I read them all and I laughed out loud for almost every single sentence. They were funny because of the pathetic characters and the hyperbolic descriptions. And again, they were all written beautifully, yet awfully.

So that was it -- I had been gnawing on dry bread and cold ham for minutes (minutes!) before realizing I was in the company of the best of the worst. I read the sentence aloud for my fellow picnickers and we all burst into giggles -- the sentence itself is very well constructed in the most horrible way and the image is disturbing yet lifelike and oddly (scarily) familiar. Congratulations, Chris! Read it and let me know what you think!


Chris will be guest blogging this week on inspiration and the writing process - how he makes time for the arts while living in a science world.