"...made her look either ethereal or like a glazed donut..."

August 15, 2023 12:58 PM

The 2023 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winners. pre vi ous ly

"She was a beautiful woman; more specifically she was the kind of beautiful woman who had an hourlong skincare routine that made her look either ethereal or like a glazed donut, depending on how attracted to her you were."

posted by Gorgik (32 comments total)

That was a different "glazed donut" reference than I was expecting below the fold.
posted by Dip Flash at 1:13 PM on August 15, 2023 [12 favorites]

That would be the essence of a good contest winner, the unexpected.
posted by Quasirandom at 1:54 PM on August 15, 2023

At some point they must have gotten their missions statement backwards. Worst possible novels? More like best possible novels!

I really appreciate the creativity of a lot of these.
posted by Zalzidrax at 2:42 PM on August 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

Huh? Ether or a glazed donut ? The choice is obvious.
posted by njohnson23 at 3:14 PM on August 15, 2023

Having sent his wife Rosemary to their cabin (for it was an unlit and turbulent night at sea), Basil maintained his position at the helm while the driving rain peppered his graying ginger hair, and the old salt thought sagely that it was a good thing he was a well-seasoned sailor.

At least this one left a good taste in my mouth.
posted by evilangela at 3:27 PM on August 15, 2023 [21 favorites]

oh what slugging isn't cool anymore?
posted by Baethan at 3:38 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Pepper + ginger + salt + sage? I dunno.
posted by Quasirandom at 3:39 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

I feel a bit annoyed about how many of these winning entires are not "Spectacularly Bad Opening Lines to Novels" but rather "Pretty Decent One Liner Jokes." I mean come on there is a huge difference between these two categories of sentences:

> Even from the hall, the overpowering stench told me the dingy caramel glow in his office would be from a ten-thousand-cigarette layer of nicotine baked on a naked bulb hanging from a frayed wire in the center of a likely cracked and water-stained ceiling, but I was broke, he was cheap, and I had to find her. ----- 2016 winner William (Barry) Brockett of Tallahassee, FL

vs.

> I knew she was trouble the second she walked into my 24-hour deli, laundromat, and detective agency, and after dropping a load of unmentionables in one of the heavy-duty machines (a mistake that would soon turn deadly) she turned to me, asking for two things: find her missing husband and make her a salami on rye with spicy mustard, breaking into tears when I told her I couldn't help—I was fresh out of salami. ----- 2022 winner John Farmer from Aurora, CO

I always feel cheated when it's a one liner joke instead of a plausible opening line to a novel, and sadly most entires straddle the line between the two *at best* or are outright jokes, not even trying to be opening sentences. Get off my lawn and go back to the one liner jokes contest where you belong!
posted by MiraK at 4:09 PM on August 15, 2023 [17 favorites]

Ah this is what I was looking for: the Lyttle Lytton contest whose curator's tastes align a lot with mine. He limits entries to 200 characters, so that we don't get the repetitive humor from long and weirdly concatenated sentences, and he says:

> Your task is to write the beginning of an imaginary novel.  Your goal is to make it hilariously bad.  Note that wacky situations and intentional jokes are more suited to the beginnings of good comedic novels, not bad serious ones, and are therefore not really what this contest is about.  On the flip side, signi­ficant butchering of the language (as opposed to subtle butchering) isn’t all that funny either. 

Which IMO is perfect.

As a result the winners of Lyttle Lytton tend to be IMO a lot better than the OG Bulwer-Lytton contest. But the best part is the commentary writeup which accompanies each year's list of winners. Adam Cadre, who runs/curates Lyttle Lytton, is truly excellent at enhancing the appeal and hilarity of each pick. Go take a look!

The writeup for this year startrs with this AI-generated gem of an entry:

> The actors stepped onto the stage and saw their audience, an audience of corpses, decomposing, maggots, and bones.

Adam's commentary: I like that one a lot; it was a shoo-in to make it onto the list of winners.  ...[I]t also has that off-kilter “I don’t really understand what I’m processing” vibe....


And then we continue with a whole section dedicated to similie-based entries:

Okay, back to the similes.

>>> Across oceans, our shimmer-selves have taken to the cool of shadows, shadows that have split open like ebony imaginariums. ---stillpointmag.org editorial statement quoted by Christopher Carter

That one goes to show how uncanny it can be when a lyrical writer composes a simile that perfectly reflects lived experience.  Just yesterday my shimmer-self, whatever that is, took to the cool of a shadow, whatever that means, and when the shadow split open, whatever that means, it did so just like an ebony imaginarium, whatever that is.

Of course, a simile does not have to use the word “like”; as any fifth-grade teacher will tell you, the word “as” also frequently signals a simile, and even tends to specify the quality that provoked the comparison.  For instance:

>>> “With whom did you leave my 30 million bucks?” snarled Jacko, the Uzi in his hand as polished and deadly as the grammar in his mouth. -----Harper J. Cole
posted by MiraK at 4:28 PM on August 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

The quoted passage is actually an insightful commentary on bullying and perspective that works for a variety of situations:

"He was a rugged survivor; more specifically he was the kind of man who kept a mental list of which supermarkets had the best stuff in case of a hurricane that made him look like either a gatherer of supplies or a looter, depending on how close to his skin tone you were."

posted by krisjohn at 4:39 PM on August 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

Noah had given up his career as a zoo architect in order to pursue his lifelong dream of making wine and during his first delivery to a campground’s 1970s-themed nightclub, was introduced with "Noah’s the vintner of our disco tent."

The Vinter of Our Disco Tent would be an incredible MeFi username.
posted by May Kasahara at 4:49 PM on August 15, 2023 [11 favorites]

(for it was an unlit and turbulent night at sea)

I hate it when they forget to light the ocean after dark. So inconvenient.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:56 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Laminar nights are the best tho
posted by LionIndex at 5:03 PM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Speaking of entries which are simply short shaggy-dog jokes, the winner in the Western category was much funnier when Kyle Baker wrote it in The Cowboy Wally Show in 1988 (screencap)
posted by cheshyre at 5:38 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

My entry was one of the dishonerable mentions this year:

The lazy summer afternoon slowly turned to evening, and no one at the Stillforest Town Potluck took note when he picked up the first one, nor the next one or the one after that, but for weeks folks in the sleepy community would excitedly talk about nothing else but the time they saw Hank McGillie carry seven folding chairs at once.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:17 PM on August 15, 2023 [21 favorites]

If there’s a snake in your boot, you dump it out by the creek, and if it’s got feathers, you dump it out in the creek, and if it’s talkin’ at you, you dump it out gently and apologize and keep an eye out for the mama dragon, and tarnation these city slickers don’t know the first thing about stayin’ alive out here.

I would absolutely read any full length work that started like this. Or better yet, listen to the audiobook version.
posted by Dorothea Ladislaw at 8:12 PM on August 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

"He was a dark and stormy knight" will never be topped.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 10:10 PM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

"Come on, baby, fight my lyre!"
posted by blue shadows at 12:27 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

But yeah, these are not as good, er bad, as they used to be - not as purple or campy, more just relying on a pun or joke. Some of them seem just one twist away from actually being not bad.
posted by blue shadows at 12:53 AM on August 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

not as purple or campy, more just relying on a pun or joke

The "Come on, baby, fight my lyre!" example you used is from a category called Vile Puns. The entire point is that the line relies on a pun. If you want opening lines that are more purple/campy, check out the Purple Prose category.

the Lyttle Lytton contest whose curator's tastes align a lot with mine. He limits entries to 200 characters, so that we don't get the repetitive humor from long and weirdly concatenated sentences

The Bulwer-Lytton contest is based on the absurdly long "It was a dark and stormy night..." opening line from Bulwer-Lyttons novel, Paul Clifford. Repetitive humor from long and weirdly concatenated sentences is the entire point.

Speaking of entries which are simply short shaggy-dog jokes

Ooof. Tough crowd. If the opening line is funny, then it's too good for a "bad writing" contest. And if the opening line is an anticlimatic non-joke, then it's just a "shaggy dog joke."

The complaints about the entries seem to be that these apples don't taste more like the oranges that the complainer prefers.
posted by AlSweigart at 5:46 AM on August 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

It was a sunny day in Los Angeles, hot and bright, and I was in my office, playing Mahjong against myself and losing, when she walked in, 120 pounds of dynamite, a blonde with legs that began at her ankles and ended in trouble.

Seriously, why is this "bad?" Is it a punctuation joke?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:21 AM on August 16, 2023

The lazy summer afternoon slowly turned to evening, and no one at the Stillforest Town Potluck took note when he picked up the first one, nor the next one or the one after that, but for weeks folks in the sleepy community would excitedly talk about nothing else but the time they saw Hank McGillie carry seven folding chairs at once.

What does it say about me that I would read between two and three books on the residents of Stillforest, based on this sentence alone?
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 6:34 AM on August 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted, if you haven't yet read T.R. Pearson's A Short History of a Small Place, you might especially like to.
posted by mochapickle at 6:39 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am totally with you, Dorothea Ladislaw, and I usually avoid audiobooks as too distracting.
posted by Quasirandom at 8:12 AM on August 16, 2023

Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted, it says that you need an audiobook about a boring-ass town to help you fall asleep. :)
posted by AlSweigart at 9:09 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Seven chairs! Well I'll be a monkey's uncle.

A cleverer person than me would segue into a great monkey's uncle story. Feel free to take the baton.
posted by obfuscation at 10:26 AM on August 16, 2023

I'm a monkey's 4th cousin twice removed if that helps. We don't talk much though, and I never see him at the family reunions.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:34 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I feel a bit annoyed about how many of these winning entires are not "Spectacularly Bad Opening Lines to Novels" but rather "Pretty Decent One Liner Jokes."

MiraK, I agree with this completely and feel like a curmudgeon for doing so.

But here's the thing: This contest is supposed to reward the best/worst first line that looks like it could have been written seriously. The ones that are wink-wink funny are missing the point. It's much more of a feat to intentionally write a terrible first line that you could imagine some author being really proud of, unironically.

This year's winner is ok - it's not expressly a pun or a joke, but the "glazed donut" bit is a little self-aware.

I like this one, which is legitimately terrible, but also reads like the beginning of an actual steampunk novel: "He gasped as the giant airship pushed itself through the fog over New York harbour, like a bosom emerging from an open blouse, and he realized his evening was going to turn into a hell of a night."

By contrast, many of them read like Douglas Adams or Jasper Fforde or Terry Prachett or someone trying to be funny.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 11:45 AM on August 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

It's not that I mind the vile pun category, I just don't want every entry to be in that category. I also thought the same thing as ChurchHatesTucker about that example.
posted by blue shadows at 9:58 PM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

On a more positive note, the BLFC doesn't appear to have been flooded by AI entries.

When other short-fiction markets were spammed with AI-generated slush, I was concerned that the BLFC rules would make it a compelling target.

I suspect the lack of any monetary reward is what saved them.
posted by cheshyre at 4:47 AM on August 17, 2023

BTW, just noticed this year's Little Lytton contest winners have been posted!
posted by cheshyre at 4:50 AM on August 17, 2023

John was a police officer, and Mary was a serial killer, and just like that you think you know how that’s going to end, don’t you; well, John lived in New York and Mary lived in London, and they were both moderately afraid of airplanes, so I bet you’re not feeling like the brightest crayon in the box right now.
- Gloria Glau Burkstaller

I would read the rest of that book.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:19 PM on August 17, 2023 [2 favorites]