Chris Wieloch of Brookfield, a “late middle-aged man” and apparent writer, has coined the best of the worst introductory sentences that would open a terrible novel.
Here is his award-winning entry:
“She strutted into my office wearing a dress that clung to her like Saran Wrap to a sloppily butchered pork knuckle, bone and sinew jutting and lurching asymmetrically beneath its folds, the tightness exaggerating the granularity of the suet and causing what little palatable meat there was to sweat, its transparency the thief of imagination.”
It is spectacularly bad.
Wieloch told the Bulwer-Lytton organizer that the downside to this particular stripe of glory is that he can’t help but think of more horribly structured sentences. “I will be throwing these turds at this contest for years to come,” he declared.
The 30-year-old contest was started by Scott Rice, a professor at San Jose State University who studied the writing of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton in graduate school, and has since taken his fascination to new heights (or lows). But why create and judge a contest in the name of the man who coined the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night”?
“Conscripted numerous times to be a judge in writing contests that were, in effect, bad writing contests but with prolix, overlong, and generally lengthy submissions, he struck upon the idea of holding a competition that would be honest and – best of all – invite brief entries,” according to the contest website. “Furthermore, it had the ancillary advantage of one day allowing him to write about himself in the third person.”
For more literary torture, you can see past contest winners here.
