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The
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Where
“WWW” means “Wretched Writers Welcome” |
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"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) |
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Lyttony
of Grand Prize Winners Bulwer-Lytton's Ancestral Estate Sticks and Stones [Updated:
6/27/10] |
· Mariann
Simms, winner of the 2003 contest, writes about the BLFC in her blog · Celine Shinbutsu:
Fantasy Category winner's blog from Japan · Suite.101.com
interviews 2008
Winner, Garrison Spik
(August 16, 2008) · Suite.101.com interviews the
Grand Panjandrum (August 16, 2008) · Guillaume Destot interviews the the Grand Panjandrum (2002) · "The Great
Bulwer-Lytton Debate" The Guardian Bulwer-Lytton's
Bicentennial Birthday Celebration at Knebworth
House,
May 20-23, 2003. Pictures
STICKS
AND STONES: To
read the spine-tingling opening chapter of Paul Clifford (and Richard
Henry Dana's review in Two Years Before the Mast [1840]), go Here.
History
of the BLFC Since
1982 the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton
Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to
compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. The contest
(hereafter referred to as the BLFC) was the brainchild (or Rosemary's baby)
of Professor Scott Rice, whose graduate school excavations unearthed the
source of the line "It was a dark and stormy night." Sentenced to
write a seminar paper on a minor Victorian novelist, he chose the man with
the funny hyphenated name, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who was best known for perpetrating
The Last Days of Pompeii, Eugene Aram, Rienzi, The Caxtons,
The Coming Race, and--not least--Paul Clifford, whose famous
opener has been plagiarized repeatedly by the cartoon beagle Snoopy. No less
impressively, Lytton coined phrases that have become common parlance in our
language: "the pen is mightier than the sword," "the great
unwashed," and "the almighty dollar" (the latter from The
Coming Race, now available from the Broadview Press). Conscripted
numerous times to be a judge in writing contests that were, in effect, bad
writing contests but with prolix, overlong, and generally lengthy
submissions, he struck upon the idea of holding a competition that would be
honest and -- best of all -- invite brief entries. Furthermore, it had the
ancillary advantage of one day allowing him to write about himself in the
third person. By
campus standards, the first year of the BLFC was a resounding success,
attracting three entries. The following year, giddy with the prospect of even
further acclaim, Rice went public with the contest and, with the boost of a
sterling press release by Public Information Officer Richard Staley,
attracted national and international attention. Staley's press release drew
immediate front-page coverage in cultural centers like Boston, Houston, and
Miami. By the time the BLFC concluded with live announcement of the winner,
Gail Cane, on CBS Morning News (since defunct through no fault of the BLFC),
it had drawn coverage from Time, Smithsonian, People Magazine, The Wall
Street Journal, The Manchester Guardian, the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation, Australian Radio, and the BBC. Most important, over 10,000
wretched writers had tried their hands at outdoing Bulwer's immortal opener,
with the best entries soon appearing in the first of a series published by
Penguin Books, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night (1984). Since
1983 the BLFC has continued to draw acclaim and opprobrium. Thousands
continue to enter yearly, the judging has been
covered by all the major American television networks, and journalists and
pundits from Charles Osgood to George F. Will have commented on the BLFC
phenomenon. And each year the winners continue to be announced by both
national and international media, including such worthies as the BBC,
Australian Radio, Radio South Africa, and Radio Blue Danube from Vienna. To
sustain the momentum, the Penguin collections of entries have reached five,
each an indispensable addition to the bookshelves of discerning readers and
collectors (lamentably, they are now all out of print, a commentary on the
misplaced and mercenary values of modern publishers). In
the meantime, Lytton's fame has not rested solely on his literary
accomplishments. In 1989 he came (albeit unbeknownst) to our attention when
his ancestral estate at Knebworth was
chosen by Tim Burton as the setting for "stately Wayne Manor" in
the movie Batman. White water enthusiasts will also be gratified to know that
the rafting capital of British Columbia, located at
the dramatic confluence of the Thompson and Fraser Rivers, takes its name
from our hero, acknowledging his tenure as Interior Secretary, when he was
responsible for building numerous roads in Australia and Western Canada. In
the off chance you are interested in the assessment of species diversity in
the Montane Cordillera Ecozone
near Lytton, B.C., go here. In the
greater likelihood that you do not give a rat's patootie
about the biogeography for selected taxa belonging to some of the major
phylogenetic groups in the eastern Rockies and western Cascades of British
Columbia, we suggest that you loiter at our site. The rules to the Bulwer-Lytton
Fiction Contest are childishly simple:
Each
entry must consist of a single sentence but you may submit as many entries as
you wish. (One fellow once submitted over 3,000 entries.) Sentences
may be of any length BUT WE STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT ENTRIES NOT GO BEYOND 50
OR 60 WORDS, and entries must be "original" (as it were) and
previously unpublished. Surface
mail entries should be submitted on index cards, the sentence on one side and
the entrant's name, address, and phone number on the other. E-mail
entries should be in the body of the message, NOT IN AN ATTACHMENT (and it
would be really swell if you submitted your entries in Arial 12 font). One
e-mail may contain multiple entries. Entries
will be judged by categories, from "general" to detective, western,
science fiction, romance, and so on. There will be overall winners as well as
category winners. The
official deadline is April 15 (a date that Americans associate with painful
submissions and making up bad stories). The actual deadline may be as late as
May 30 (the 2009 results will be released by mid-June). The
contest accepts submissions every day of the livelong year. Wild
Card Rule: Resist the temptation to work with puns like "It was a stark
and dormy night." Finally,
in keeping with the gravitas, high seriousness, and general bignitude of the contest, the grand prize winner will
receive . . . a pittance. Send
your entries to: Bulwer-Lytton
Fiction Contest Inflict
your entries electronically, HERE
(and
please include your name, phone number, and addresses--Gastropoda
and e-mail [Note: this data is for our contact
information, not for public consumption.] |
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This site is maintained by Scott Rice, in consultation with Julianne Presson
(design).
Copyright 1997-2010 Scott Rice
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED