As he sat bareback on his horse, inspecting his band of brave warriors about to leave for an encounter with troops from the 6th cavalry out of Fort Apache, their smoky eyed, rosy cheeked, lip glossed faces staring up at him, Chief Silver Cloud realized, to his dismay, that the unwritten rules of war paint protocol had been violated and it was time to have a serious discussion with that pesky Avon lady who had recently been frequenting the camp.
That entry from Bill Shelly gained two first-place votes — including mine — and finished sixth overall in our 13th sort-of-annual local version of the famous Bulwer-Lytton writing contest.
That real international event, run for decades by San Jose State University, recognizes the first sentence of the worst possible novel, paying tribute to Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote this immortal opening line:
“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
Participation in our local tribute to this contest pales by comparison, but we did get 176 entries, mightily buoyed by an astounding 109 sentences from perennial real Bulwer-Lytton place winner Andrew Lundberg of Los Angeles.
As you might expect, some of the same names come up year after year. Although I bill this as a bad writing contest, the winners tend to be good writers who have a flair for this odd art form.
For example, this year’s top 10 included past place winners Karen Kelly and Deb Martin. I’ll start with Kelly’s sentence:
Troy was flirting with Trudy in the crowded bar all night and finally got the courage to ask for her phone number, nervously holding a ballpoint pen and cocktail napkin in his shaking clammy hands, to which she responded “three” as he waited for her to disclose more digits until he realized her brains didn’t equal her beauty when she told him she had one in the kitchen, one in the living room and one in the bedroom.
Martin’s entry got a first-place vote from one of our judges:
Carl (“With a C!” he told everyone upon introduction.) glanced at Tina (“With a T! she had replied with a smile when they first met, winning his heart and buckling his knees) and wondered how she would react when, after dating for six months — the last three exclusively — she learned his dark secret: He was really Karl with a K.
Although my top choice never has won any of these contests, I do influence the results by winnowing all those entries down to the best 30. I try to make sure no one has more than 3-4 sentences, no matter how many they submitted, but the goal ultimately is to put the best entries before my panel of judges. Each of them picks his/her top five, in order, and I tabulate the results.
The only trend I noticed this year — beyond the usual impulse to write preposterously long sentences despite my annual warning that it’s not a long sentence contest — was a lot of puns, including this year’s winning sentence. I’ll share that and our other top winners next time, but I wanted to include some of my favorite also-rans today, because this really was a bumper crop.
For example, Jim Melick’s sentence appeared in three judges’ top five. Here it is:
Lounging on the Ocean City beach, Mary basked in the warm glow of John’s news that his 401k account had just passed the million dollar mark, and she was waving cheerfully at him as he bobbed and splashed in the waves when she suddenly realized that he was struggling in a rip tide, at which point she shouted as loudly as she could, “John, quick, what’s the password!?”
Deb Martin had another entry that appeared on three scorecards:
The rays of sun shining in from the west as they drove north toward Canada highlighted the sparkle that was Becca — glowing skin, shiny curls, bedazzled jean jacket, glitter-painted nails and a glistening rivulet of moisture from her slightly reddened nose that she swiped at with the back of her hand before reaching into the bag of pretzel Combos they’d been sharing for the past 100 miles but which now would be exclusively hers.
Finally, here’s one from perennial place winner Steve Lauducci, who missed the Top 10 this year but did get one second-place vote:
This is the tale of how I struggled to get my first book published, navigating my way through the near-impenetrable maze of the literary-industrial complex in all its Byzantine bureaucratic inscrutability, starting from the very beginning of the process when I first typed “This is the tale of how I struggled to get my first book published, navigating my way through…”
I’ll share our top five, including a first-time champion, next time.
Bill White can be reached at [email protected].
