The Worst!

The "winners" of the 2020 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been named, crowning the writer with the worst opening sentence for a supposed novel.

The contest is held by the San Jose State University English Department and is named for Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose purple prose often wound up being not descriptive or evocative -- but just bad. His opening sentence of the 1830 novel Paul Clifford began with the simple phrase "It was a dark and stormy night" but quickly falls apart into a sloppy mess. Paul Clifford was, despite the scorn heaped upon it over the years, a best seller.

San Jose State has held the contest since 1982. Most of the time it's fairly interesting, although after almost 40 years one tends to get the impression that the entries are just pacing over familiar ground. Since none of the sentences are from actual novels and since they are deliberately composed to be as bad as possible, my suggestion for livening things up a bit would be to use actual novels published during the year of the contest. It seems like it would be more in the spirit of an actual Bulwer-Lytton novel, since those were not deliberately written to be bad and since many of the touches a modern audience derides were often a part of the common way of speaking of the time.

You'd probably have to limit it in some way, though. The ability to self-publish brought about by ebooks would produce far too many candidates to be sorted through -- even though there are some hidden gems in the field the rest make the value of good editing abundantly clear. And it would probably be a good idea to retire some best-selling authors after their first win or two or they would dominate the field.