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Madison, Wisconsin: Land of the Terrible Writers

July 31, 2007 1:28 AM

here is apparently something called the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, the purpose of which is to find the worst opening sentence to a fake novel each year. The contest was inspired by the line "It was a dark and stormy night," which apparently actually is the first line of a really bad novel.

In any event, would-be authors submit their horrible sentences each year, and the winner gets the grand prize--$250--and some well-deserved notoriety. If you go to the site, you can read some really, really awful sentences. My personal favorite is this one:

She wasn't really my type, a hard-looking but untalented reporter from the local cat box liner, but the first second that the third-rate representative of the fourth estate cracked open a new fifth of old Scotch, my sixth sense said seventh heaven was as close as an eighth note from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, so, nervous as a tenth grader drowning in eleventh-hour cramming for a physics exam, I swept her into my longing arms, and, humming "The Twelfth of Never," I got lucky on Friday the thirteenth.
You've gotta be really clever to write something that bad.

Anyway, this year's winner--Jim Gleeson--hails from right here in Madison, Wisconsin. Here's his winning--or losing, depending on how you look at it--sentence:

Gerald began — but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them 'permanently' meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash — to pee.
Yup, that's pretty bad.

I'm glad to see that, in addition to beer, cheese, fat people, and cows (of the real and fiberglass variety), we're now known for our really bad authors. Great!



3 Comments


tRJ said:

There's a great deal of emphasis put on the first line of a book. I knew a guy who kept track of every book he ever read. And rather than list them by title, he listed them by first line. I, myself, will not buy a book if the first line is crap.

The result is that people really labor over that first line, and typically end up with something awful. When I attempted NaNoWriMo, I got together with some of the Madison writers. And there were some unbelievably bad openers. The big joke was that you weren't serious unless you killed some in the first line. Glad to see this year's worst opening winner pulled off a kill.

For the record, some classic first lines that don't suck:

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins." -Lolita

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." -Pride and Prejudice

And for simplicity, you can't beat The Iliad: "This is the story of Achilles' rage."

July 31, 2007 9:27 AM



Wade said:

I'm currently reading Neil Gaiman's "American Gods," in which the city of Madison and The House on the Rock both feature prominently. Good times.

August 1, 2007 12:00 PM



Vice said:

Despite the familiar references, I struggled to get through "American Gods," and I usually love Neil Gaiman. It seemed like he was going for something clever and completely epic, and instead ended up with something clever and completely bloated.

August 1, 2007 9:26 PM



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