Thursday, August 14, 2008
Every year, a contest is held for 'Worst opening line to a fictitious novel'. Here's this year's winning entry:
"Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped 'Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."It's called the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, named after Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton whose 1830 novel "Paul Clifford" famously begins "It was a dark and stormy night."
**UPDATE**
Here's my entry:
"The leaves fell in crimson unison, fluttering in synchrony with the currents and eddies of his stride as he sailed on along the park sidewalk with jaded indifference to the surrounding red beauty -- his lust for autumn now a flaccid and dysfunctional memory that no blue pill could ever revive, even for a few hours."
Link to Yahoo news article
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5 Comments:
Whoa - that one is a doozy! I had to read the sentence 3 times to figure out it was saying that "their" romance is quite passionate. What's up with the last part: "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."?
Yeah, I love this contest. What's interesting is that it takes a pretty good writer to try and sound like a bad writer trying to write well. It would be like a professional singer trying to convincingly mimic good karaoke.
I think the last clause you mentioned is making fun of how writers describe arbitrary details of some object; details that are obscure enough to make you sound more observant and poetic.
I edited the post to include my submission. Enjoy :)
hahaha, I loled at both the winner and your entry D man =)
Haha. Thanks, Pete. I made sure to include 2 of the most cringe-inducing words in writing for me: "crimson" and "jaded". I wanted to throw "dew" in there somewhere but it didn't quite make the cut.
I LOLed as well at yours. At first, I thought you were making a Matrix reference (blue pill). But then I saw saw that you squeezed "flaccid" and "dysfunctional" in there and realized the true cause of this poor fellows "jaded indifference to the surrounding red beauty."
Nicely work.
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