This year's Bulwer Lytton Award winners announced

[Boyo_Jim]

For you newbies, the aim is to write the most dreadful possible opening sentence to a novel, a sentence that would make the people close the book right then and there. It is the 29th year of the contest.

Here are the 2011 winners.

Past winners are here.

[PlainJain]

This years winner is quite good… I mean bad!

[Lantern]

This must be the shortest winning sentence ever which is impressive because I think it’s easier to write long,bad sentences.

[Princhester]

I love the winner. Short yet manages to be utterly inconsistent in tone and voice: completely jarring. Fantastic.

I think the runner up is weak and unoriginal and I can’t believe it was chosen. It’s just a standard big build up followed by a predictable let down.

[Leaper]

The Romance category winner actually got a sudden burst of laughter from me.

[Boyo_Jim]

Yes, the winner is in fact the shortest winning sentence in the history of the contest.

[WordMan]

It’s a great sentence - follows the metaphor through to the bitter end.

[Ellen_Cherry]

I like this one:

They called her The Cat, because she made love the way she fought, rolling rapidly across the floor in a big, blurry ball of shrieking hair, fury, and dander, which usually solicited a “Shut up!” and flung shoe from one of the neighbors, and left her exhilarated lover with serious patchy bald spots and the occasional nicked ear.

[Malacandra]

And there was quite a good joke hidden in that one about the “If You Build It” sperm bank.

[Ludovic]

I love this one since it manages to cover all the bases. Unlike a lot of generic-seeming ones which focus on one flaw, this has purple prose, self-hijacking, AND odd specificity:

Rosy lips aquiver, Lauren drizzled with tears the wave-tousled sands of Wampauset Municipal Area Public Access Beach, hearing in every shriek of shrike and plaint of plover the ancient wail–kreeAHH, kreeAHH!–of good women widowed by the sea, as well as tonal nuances indicating the shorebirds’ relative levels of copulative receptiveness, for our umber-eyed heroine is both lover and ornithologist.

[Gyrate]

Many of them are really two sentences mashed together, which weakens the whole concept. Sometimes brevity works:

Business was kinda slow at the ‘If You Build It’ sperm bank.

[Chefguy]

This one sounds like something I would write:

As the young officer studied the oak door, he was reminded of his girlfriend --for she was also slightly unhinged, occasionally sticky, and responded well to being stripped and given a light oiling.

[Scuba_Ben]

I’m disappointed that the Purple Prose winners weren’t in purple.

[Boyo_Jim]

Damn, I’ll try to remember next time.

[Scuba_Ben]

Oh, are you still on the judging committee, Jim?

[Boyo_Jim]

Yes, I’m one of about a dozen people. I think my sour, unemployed mood affected my judging this year though. My votes were way far away from everyone else’s, and I can tell from the comments in this thread that I wasn’t properly appreciating these entries.

[Drain_Bead]

When does the contest open for new entries? I came up with one a few months ago, checked to see how to submit, didn’t see anything, and then promptly forgot about it.

[Boyo_Jim]

Scott Rice will take entries year round. The deadline for the current year is April 15, but if you send it later he’ll just throw it in next year’s pile.

Make sure to include reliable contact info. A couple of years ago we were going to award the prize to someone who only included a name and email address, and we couldn’t get a response or any further info once we picked it - the email address was no longer valid, and it was a very common name without even a city to look in a phone book for – so we ended up awarding somebody else.

[Quercus]

Am I the only one who thinks that they’re all starting to sound the same: long and inappropriate metaphors, with sudden shifts from an objective third person to a narrator addressing the reader?

It just seems a shame, given the universe of ways that opening sentences can go wrong, to focus only on two of them. I mean, sure, I can understand restricting entries to sentences without clear errors in syntax and what-not, but there’s still a lot of ways to go wrong, even earnestly go wrong.

I liked this one, only because there was a (probably unintended) glimmer of a new mistake: the way a single discursive thought is started within the dashes, then carried right on through the closing dash.

From the limbs of ancient live oaks moccasins hung like fat black sausages – which are sometimes called boudin noir, black pudding or blood pudding, though why anyone would refer to a sausage as pudding is hard to understand and it is even more difficult to divine why a person would knowingly eat something made from dried blood in the first place – but be that as it may, our tale is of voodoo and foul murder, not disgusting food.

(Yes, someone do please remind me of this post when the contest opens next year)

[Panurge]

I agree, Quercus, and this has been the case many times, unfortunately. I like the ones that diverge from this pattern. Why this one was hidden at the bottom of the page, I don’t know:

The grisly scene before him was like nothing Detective Smith had ever seen before, but there were millions and millions of things he had never seen before, and he couldn’t help but wonder which of them it was.

.

I know how our detective feels…