It was a bright and sunny afternoon, which was pestering me like a relentless mosquito that simply won’t go away even after you’ve helpfully pointed towards neighboring people with far more blood to spare, because I was trying to commit something terrible on my keyboard and the beautiful day was allowing a degree of heretofore unsuspected quality to creep in, a literary device that would surely get me disqualified from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest faster than an Olympic runner with roller skate implants.
This contest, started by Scott Rice in 1982 and sponsored by the English Department at San Jose State University, celebrates the glorious wonder of truly awful writing. “Bulwer-Lytton” is a nod towards the Victorian writer Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who penned, among other things, this immortal book-killer from Paul Clifford in 1830:
“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.”
You just can’t fake that sort of awfulness. It takes a certain way with words to evoke the right kind of shudder from your readers. You have to work at it. And they do, thousands of them from across the world who submit their laughably putrid prose every year. Last year’s winning entry was from Dave Zobel of Manhattan Beach, CA:
“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.”
The entries are all single-sentence openings for imaginary novels. You can read the previous ones – and enter your own — at www.bulwer-lytton.com . Some are convoluted. Some are one-liners: “Although Sarah had an abnormal fear of mice, it did not keep her from eeking out a living at a local pet store.” Some are just plain wrong.
Which is why I’m hopeful. A writing contest where the goal is not to create wonder, delighted belief or shared introspection with your readers, but more of a wince and, ideally, some audible sound of distress? I may be overqualified.
Here, then, are a few suggestions for worst opening sentence in a hopefully-never-written novel.
***
“Captain Magnificent stood exhausted amidst the crumpled results of his mighty labors and reflected, as the screaming crowds rushed towards him, that maybe ‘compact cars’ wasn’t really a command after all.”
***
“She walked through my door like a blonde bombshell — tight-fitting dress, stiletto heels, and all — and I marveled at the way she could smash through a thick wooden door with a glass window and brass fittings and still lie there so cool and calculating in a widening pool of her own devilishly sexy blood.”
***
“The sun beat down mercilessly, relentlessly, like a manic ex-girlfriend who disregarded restraining orders to sneak past police protection and slash my tires, brutalize my cat, and threaten my kids, although the ex-girlfriend probably couldn’t give me a nasty sunburn on my nose, which is why the sun was so much worse.”
***
“The summer breeze whipped playfully through my hair, which was strewn across the country far and wide, clogging up drains, aggravating allergies, blocking traffic, and in short doing everything it could think of except for staying on my head where it belonged before my tragic ‘summer breeze’ incident.”
***
“As the sounds of the first truck backing into his driveway mixed with the cries of a million billion screaming, tortured souls howling to be free, Vince began to feel buyer’s remorse over what he had up until now considered a pretty shrewd eBay purchase.”
***
“‘You’re killing me, Hubert, killing me,’ she cried as the knife struck home, taking one last chance to remind me in that annoying, whiny way she always had of telling me things I already knew, and, incidentally, remind me why I bought the knife.”
***
You know, deplorable writing isn’t as tough as I thought. Maybe columnists have a natural aptitude for it and should therefore recuse themselves from this contest, to be fair.
After I win.