It’s That Time Again For My Favorite Annual Literary Event

That is, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Thanks to Mr. Z for forwarding the results of this year’s contest to me.

So what is this contest? And who the hell is Bulwer-Lytton? I actually have a vast store of useless knowledge about this man, because he was the favorite writer of Lucy Maud Montgomery, when she was a kid. Because of my obsession with HER, I actually read some of Bulwer-Lytton’s stuff.

His is the purplest of purple purple prose. LM Montgomery later looked back on his stuff and thought, “What was I THINKING?” and yet she always defended him, because in doing so, she honored how much she had loved him when she was young.

Now – onto the contest-description:

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.”

And here are the 2004 winners and runners-up. These are CLASSIC!!

The winner, Dave Zobel, came up with this bad opening sentence:

She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight . . . summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp’s tail . . . though the term “love affair” now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism . . . not unlike “sand vein,” which is after all an intestine, not a vein . . . and that tarry substance inside certainly isn’t sand . . . and that brought her back to Ramon.

But all the entries are hysterical.

This one, sent in by Siew-Fong Yiap of Hong Kong might be my favorite:

The legend about Padre Castillo’s gold being buried deep in the Blackwolf Hills had lain untold for centuries and will continue to do so for this story is not about hidden treasure, nor is it set in any mountainous terrain whatsoever.

HA!!

This one, though, is pretty damn good, too – It’s a parody of Bulwer-Lytton’s “dark and stormy night” line:

It was a stark and dormy night–the kind of Friday night in the dorm where wistful women/girls without dates ovulated pointlessly and dreamed of steamy sex with bad boy/men in the backseat of a Corvette–like the one on Route 66, only a different color, though the color was hard to determine because the TV show was in black and white–if only Corvettes had back seats.

Jesus. “Ovulated pointlessly” … ha … sounds like my life!

Anyway, read them all, and laugh!!

This entry was posted in writers. Bookmark the permalink.

11 Responses to It’s That Time Again For My Favorite Annual Literary Event

  1. Emily says:

    Mr. Z sent me that as well. There was this other similar contest I wrote him about. I can’t remember what it is called or who runs it, but I’m hoping either you or one of your readers can. These people hunt down horrid essays by “academics” where it’s obvious that the authors have used a thesaurus for every last word, each time choosing the most ridiculously obscure and multi-syllibic one they can find. I’ve read a few of them – they’re really funny, escpecially since the prat that wrote them probably thought he was coming off really smart.

  2. red says:

    Emily – I think I linked to that once. It was HYSTERICAL. Let me search for it

  3. red says:

    Okay, I found it INSANELY quickly.

    Here it is: http://www.aldaily.com/bwc.htm

    The winning sentence??

    The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

    Ha!!

  4. Emily says:

    Thanks, Sheila. I’m heading over there RIGHT NOW. I’m suffering the need to feel superior to others right now.

  5. dad says:

    Emily should have no doubts that she is a superior person.

  6. Big Dan says:

    Wait a second! That was a contest for BAD sentences?

    I guess I shouldn’t be so proud of my previous wins.

  7. Pat W says:

    Thank god nobody’s in the office with me. I shouldn’t be laughing this hard at work.

  8. Mr. Z says:

    Holy cow – that other contest is a RIOT, made funnier by the fact that they’re actually trying to be serious.

    Sadly, a search of the web seems to indicate that the contest is no longer taking place…

  9. Emily says:

    Sheila’s dad: *shucks* :)

  10. spd rdr says:

    A feel-good rollercoastering laugh-riot that the whole family can enjoy, well maybe not the whole family, because some of the kids can’t read yet, and you know how sulky teenagers can be, and no way are you going to get my wife on a rolecoaster, so it’ll probably just be me enjoying it, but it’s not as much fun when you’re alone.

  11. A Stark And Dormy Night

    Since my concentration was completely destroyed at the end of the day yesterday, I see no reason not to derail yours today. The 2004 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Results are out. If you’re not familiar with this contest, it parodies the

Comments are closed.