Helen Grainge, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontarioīefore they met, his heart was a frozen block of ice, scarred by the skate blades of broken relationships, then she came along and like a beautiful Zamboni flooded his heart with warmth, scraped away the ugly slushy bits, and dumped them in the empty parking lot of his soul.

Mildred, sitting under the hair dryer at The Curl & Go and thumbing through a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, felt a shudder and a fleeting moment of commiseration when she saw those tiny thongs the models were sporting in the name of underwear because, as it happened, her own butt cheeks tended to gobble up her Fruit of the Loom For Mature Women white cotton panties like a pair of starving wolverines fighting over a flatfish.

When the slinky redhead slunk into the throbbing, strobe-lit nightclub, Elwood’s eyes fastened on her the way a toilet plunger will fasten onto a hard surface if you shove it down just right, but her returning glance, while smoldering, was actually more caustic and burned his tender ego the way liquid Drano can burn your hand if you spill some on it, having disregarded the manufacturer’s warning.

Here are a few of my personal favorites from the 2013 competition.

This year's winners have now been announced and I would say they are definitely up to Bulwer-Lytton standards. Each year, they are flooded with examples of awful, terrible, no-good prose from enthusiastic entrants from around the world. Since 1982 the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. All of which probably tells you more than you want or need to know about my teenage summers.) I also read Tolstoy's War and Peace and enjoyed it so much that I turned around and read the whole thing again. (Full disclosure: When I was a teenager, one summer, I read Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii and I actually quite enjoyed it. In fact, his beginning, 'It was a dark and stormy night,' has become a well-worn cliche, conferring on Bulwer-Lytton a kind of immortality which perhaps his writing does not really deserve. Today, it seems only fair that I give equal time to the other side of the coin, so to speak.Įdward Bulwer-Lytton, an early 19th century English novelist, has the reputation of having composed some of the worst fiction in English ever, as the above example of his first sentence to his novel Paul Clifford may serve to illustrate. Yesterday, I blogged about Elmore Leonard's rules for good writing.

'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.” - Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

Lyttony of grand prize winners