“Personal and professional lives collided that morning as newlywed and first-year med student Amira tried to concentrate on dissecting her cadaver’s digestive system, which triggered her awareness that nothing had been planned for their one month anniversary dinner that night, and that the quickest way to a man’s heart was not, as her mother had tried to instill in her, through his stomach, it was in fact through the fourth and fifth rib.”
That entry from past winner Kent Simendinger tied for fifth in this year’s local version of the Bulwer-Lytton writing contest, which I’m finally wrapping up with columns today and in two weeks.
For those who are unfamiliar with what we’re doing, I’ll explain that this is the 10th sort-of-annual edition of my contest. It shamelessly piggybacks on the real Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, an international phenomenon run by San Jose State University.
The competition to write the first sentence of the worst possible novel honors Victorian novelist Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton and the famous opening sentence of his novel “Paul Clifford”:
“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.”
If you are a follower of the comic strip “Peanuts,” you may recognize “It was a dark and stormy night …” as the beginning of all Snoopy’s periodic novel attempts. He is not alone. Our second-place sentence — which I’ll unveil next time — began the same way.
I promised vintage Eating My Way Through Musikfest T-shirts to the top winners. But the real prize is achieving greatness in the pantheon of skillful bad writers.
I labored through 88 awful sentences submitted by readers and culled them to the best/worst 21, then turned them over to my team of six semi-demented judges. They were asked to pick their top five, in order, and I tallied the points.
Tying Simendinger for fifth was this endless effort from Chuck Pinyan, one of many entrants who adopted a COVID-19 theme.
“Hector woke that glorious morning eager to spend the whole day planning in every detail his trip of a lifetime, the six-month, 20-state thrill-of-a-lifetime road adventure he had been dreaming about for years, in his new oversized (and over-priced) van, in which he would put his new souped-up ATV, his electric bike, skis, hiking gear, as well as his pop-up tent and extensive (and expensive) camping gear, and boxes of maps, then opened his computer, pulled up a blank page to begin listing the national parks, state parks and various other amazing sights and events he planned to visit, but reached over to the TV controller first, to put on the news, just in time to hear the announcement of the nationwide lockdown due to COVID-19.”
Pinyan confessed he wrote it last year in the dark early days of the pandemic, but never got around to submitting it until this spring.
Last year’s winner, Julie Cleary, went the pun route. Although her sentence made me laugh out loud, the pun was a little too familiar to get more than one top five vote:
“The sea was particularly turbulent when a flock of terns, those pesky, sea gull-like birds, waited anxiously for the tugboat they were encircling to regurgitate its 500-pound cargo of marijuana into the churning waves, and when at last it did, no tern was left unstoned.”
Fact is, it is hard to come up with a truly original pun. Another entry, from Tom Stackhouse, also drew on one that has made the rounds over the years. It finished first on one judge’s card:
“As if in a riparian dreamscape, he straddled the torrential riffle like the Colossus of Rhodes or a modern day Poseidon or some other demigod, and cast his fly immediately sensing a mighty strike on his floating xanthic smooth 6 weight fly-line, the reel singing a Siren song as the silken leader strained against his unseen piscine foe, reminding him of his favorite show tune ‘Salmon-chanted Evening,’ only to discover he had snagged a tree.”
Speaking of Cleary and Simendinger, I find it interesting that even though many of the same people are top contenders year after year, we have never had a repeat winner. That is a testament to the depth of the Lehigh Valley’s bad writing talent.
So, who is the best of the worst in 2021? That and the rest of our top four will be revealed next time.
Bill White can be reached at whitebil1974@gmail.com. His Twitter handle is whitebil.
