So bad… it’s a winner.
By Eric Hill • Jun 29th, 2010 • Category: Contests, Editor's Picks, From the Interweb, In Brief
An unseemly sentence that compares a kiss to the union of a thirsty gerbil and a giant water bottle has won the top prize in an annual bad writing contest.
San Jose State University said Tuesday that Molly Ringle of Seattle was the grand prize winner of the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
In her entry, Ringle describes a “lengthy, ravenous kiss” between two lovers: “Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.”
The literary competition honours the memory of Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, the Victorian writer famous for beginning his novel Paul Clifford with the line, “It was a dark and stormy night.”
Entrants are asked to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels.
This year’s runner-up, by Tom Wallace of Columbia, SC, was:
“Through the verdant plains of North Umbria walked Waylon Ogglethorpe and, as he walked, the clouds whispered his name, the birds of the air sang his praises, and the beasts of the fields from smallest to greatest said, ‘There goes the most noble among men’ — in other words, a typical stroll for a schizophrenic ventriloquist with delusions of grandeur.”
To see more results, click here.
Eric Hill is the editor of branta.
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