“For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.”
This brilliantly bad sentence written by Molly Ringle has won her first place in San Jose State University’s annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Inspired by Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, a writer best known for beginning his novel “Paul Clifford” with the sentence “It was a dark and stormy night” and coining other phrases such as “the pen is mightier than the sword”, the competition challenges writers to create the opening sentence to a hypothetical, unbearably bad story.
Along with overall winners, category winners are selected for western, romance, detective, and more. Submissions are accepted year-round and winners are announced in June. To enter, email srice@pacbell.net with your name, phone number, address, and stunningly bad sentence in Arial 12 font.
