For the past 25 years, San Jose State University’s English department has been asking writers to do their worst. That is, to submit the worst opening sentence of the worst imaginary novel they can, well, imagine. The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has been updated for the Internet world, with the motto, “Where WWW means ‘Wretched Writers Welcome.’” Just announced, the 2007 grand-prize winner:
“Gerald began—but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash—to pee.”
This eruption of prose comes from the volcanic mind of Jim Gleeson, a 47-year-old media technician from Madison, Wis. Also worth noting, in this season of Harry Potter, is the winner in the children’s-literature division, Dave McKenzie of Federal Way, Wash. He wrote: “Danny, the little Grizzly cub, frolicked in the tall grass on this sunny Spring morning, his mother keeping a watchful eye as she chewed on a piece of a hiker they had encountered the day before.”
The competition is named after (“in honor of” is not quite the right sentiment) the Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who penned a novel with the immortal opening line, “It was a dark and stormy night.”
And you thought Snoopy came up with that one on his own. —Josh Fischman
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