This year’s edition of our Bulwer-Lytton writing competition has dragged on to the point where I suspect most of you had forgotten about it.
In my defense, I felt called to write about weightier issues, and I only have two columns a month. But rest assured that your entries — almost 140 bad sentences — in this ninth sort-of-annual contest have not been forgotten.
My local contest is a ripoff of the real Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, an international competition of great renown. It recognizes Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton and his novel-opening sentence that begins, “It was a dark and stormy night …”
For the last four decades, San Jose State University has challenged entrants to submit the first sentence of the worst possible novel. Several local writers and I have been recognized as category winners or “Dishonorable Mentions” over the years, an honor I treasure.
I put the call out this year not long after we began sheltering in place, hoping to give readers and me something fun to do. Not only have I received noteworthy entries from pretty much all my past champions and many promising newcomers, but I also got sentences from Bulwer-Lytton place-winners from other parts of the country.
I bill this as a bad writing competition, but that’s really a misnomer. As you’ll see if you peruse San Jose’s website for winners, it takes a good writer to produce a good bad sentence, and this year’s entries were a reminder that the Lehigh Valley has a lot of good bad writers.
Some people also used this as an occasion to submit grammar police commentary, newspaper bloopers and even a 50-year-old high school book report that truly deserved the “F” it received.
One local woman, Roz Gerken, combined this competition with a cool project she had undertaken during the pandemic. She explained:
“My grandson and I have had a word exchange. He was a freshman at High Point University when the world changed in March. When my daughter picked him up, on the ride home, he called and mentioned the word ‘besmirch.’ Since March 13, we have alternated finding interesting words, one a day, to tell each other. We look at the roots, related words and create a sentence using that day’s word. The rule: The sentence must depict the word’s definition. (I’m a retired English teacher).”
I love this. She and her grandson both ended up creating sentences from words they had researched. They were too long to squeeze in here, but it was very educational.
I used fewer judges — five — than the old days, when I had a newsroom to draw from, and there was a wide disparity of opinions among us. I asked each to rank his or her top five in order and added the numbers to reach the final results.
I’ll reveal the winner and top place-winners in two weeks. Meanwhile, here are the entries that tied for seventh:
* “Sipping his 2013 Tuscan Brunello, with aromas of dark cherries, undertones of peaches and orange peel and some floral character, John reminisced on the rollicking good time they had out on the dunes of the cape until that damn storm blew up and they were caught in the rain which washed off the sand but left him wondering if he even had half a brain for responding to that personal ad and lying about liking pina coladas.” ? Rick Gobrecht.
(This entry received one first-place vote, from a judge who explained, “The reference to the ‘Pina Colada Song’ made this my top choice — a stupid song with bad lyrics providing a twist to an overwritten sentence.”)
* “When the wolves behind his house started howling, Lenny watched his dog stand on his hind legs scratching at the door, like hearing a beckoning from past ancestors, and Lenny felt the same sensation the first time he heard Kate Smith sing ‘God Bless America’ at a Flyers’ hockey game, as her voice mimicked his grandmother’s when she sang lullabies to him while babysitting, except Kate Smith was big and fat and his grandmother was skinny because she always watched what she ate.” ? past winner Ron Pizarie.
That one was my choice for first place, but it got no other votes, which is typical of my luck in picking the winners.
Check back in two weeks for the Best of the Best. Or the Worst of the Worst, depending on how you look at it.
Bill White can be reached at whitebil1974@gmail.com. His Twitter handle is whitebil.
