Bad writing becomes an art form in annual contest for world's worst prose

A flying pork product helped an Austin writer claim literary infamy in this year's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which crowns the author of the worst opening sentence to an imaginary novel. Lawrence Person beat out more than 6,300 contestants with his deliberately dreadful description:

"She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-pound ham-hock tossed from a speeding truck."

The winning entry captures perfectly the spirit of the contest, which celebrates purposefully purple prose and memorably mangled metaphors.

Named after Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton — who gave us the infamous "It was a dark and stormy night" opener—this quirky literary competition has been running for 42 years. Bulwer-Lytton's original sin against literature appeared in his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford, featuring an opening paragraph so overwrought it became a template for bad 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."

Check out some of the other submissions:

David Hynes of Bromma, Sweden, submitted a sentence to a non-existent novel that I would love to read:

It had seemed a good idea at the time, the first night of my two-week all-inclusive vacation, spent with an affable stranger in a tapas bar oiled by an excess of Corona Extra and tequila shots, but now, in fancy dress holding a red cape, under a pitiless noonday sun, while 1000 pounds of snorting horned beefsteak eyed me malevolently, hoofing a hole in the dirt, the packed spectators oléing for all their worth, I, a junior sales rep in kitchen utensils from Milwaukee, wasn't so sure. —

Gwen Simonalle of Grenoble, France also produced a sentence that I want a novel to follow:

"The hell . . . ?" wondered Dread Lord Atunkhamen, awakening to find his sumptuous sarcophagus transformed into an airtight glass box and his hordes of groveling undead servants into a sea of snotty schoolchildren, bored museum staff, goggling tourists, and an endless sea of faceless smartphones.

And Leslie Muir of Atlanta, Georgia, wrote the beginning of a promising beach read:

Norman gazed searchingly into Susan's mesmerizing Windex-colored eyes, observing that her left eye was quite lighter than her right, more like a watered-down generic glass cleaner, probably at a dilution ratio of 1:3 which Norman predicted would definitely leave some streaks.

Check out all the category winners and runners-up here.

Previously:
Ted Chiang on Writing
Stephen King on writing
What Jules Feiffer taught me about writing for kids
Rod Serling talks to college students about the craft of writing
Ruminations on decades spent writing stories that run more than 1,000,000 words