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SO BAD IT'S GOOD

Remember that long-winded, bombastic opening sentence to your first novel? The one you wrote half-jokingly and then crumpled up in a ball and tossed into the trash, never to see the light of day again? Well, get ready to salvage that sucker and enter it in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. This annual writing competition, named after verbose Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, challenges writers to come up with the absolute worse opening sentence to an imaginary novel, one so bad it will beat thousands of other entries from all over the world. The competition is sponsored each year by San Jose State University's English Department, who dares you to top this year's winner, by Gary Dahl: "The heather-encrusted Headlands, veiled in fog as thick as smoke in a crowded pub, hunched precariously over the moors, their rocky elbows slipping off land's end, their bulbous, craggy noses thrust into the thick foam of the North Sea like bearded old men falling asleep in their pints."

Tue, 18 Jul 2000 08:10:08 -0700