Guest Post: How to Win the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest by Jim Guigli

Please welcome back author Jim Guigli to the blog today as he discusses how he won the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest and how you just might do so too. After you read the below, make sure you go checkout his guest post from January on how his short story, “Looking for Mishka” came to be in Rock and a Hard Place: Issue 7: Winter 2022.

 

How to Win the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

by Jim Guigli

 

Are flash fiction stories too long for you?  How about just one sentence?  Then you’re ready for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.  You can enter all year:

https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

“The contest accepts submissions every day of the livelong year, but the deadline for each year’s contest is June 30th.”

 

First, what is it, and why should I care?

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is a bad writing competition where you write the opening sentence to the world’s worst novel, just like Bulwer-Lytton did when he wrote in 1830, “It was a dark and stormy night . . . ,” for his novel,  Paul Clifford.   Just think, if you had written that sentence, you would be world famous . . . or infamous. 

Speaking of world famous, just type my name into Google or whatever search engine you like.  From California to Finland, I am famous . . . or infamous.  (There is no such thing as bad publicity.)  They have interviewed me on the radio in California (thrice), Sacramento TV (twice), Sacramento newspapers (twice), radio in England (twice) and Australia.  That’s what you get when you win the Bulwer-Lytton Contest, like I did in 2006.  (The wire services are not as generous lately.)  The other reasons to enter are:

1.  To improve your own writing.  If you study what is bad writing, you will work with the mirror image of good writing.

2.  The opening sentence of your novel is arguably the most important sentence you will ever write.

But I promised to tell you how to win.  Sorry, I won, and even I don’t know how I won.   The judges aren’t talking, and I’m just guessing.  I assume I won because that year I was lucky enough to have a weak field of competition, and my sentence, like an aging hooker buried in makeup at last call, caught someone’s eye.  For the record, here is my winning sentence:

Detective Bart Lasiter was sitting in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super-burrito, when his door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said You’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.

I entered 64 times that contest year.  You can’t beat perseverance..

But, as a Judge every year since 2007 — all Grand Prize Winners are invited to judge the finals — I can tell you what I like and don’t like, but don’t send me your entries because I’ll have to recuse myself.

What I like:  Sentences that could be actual opening sentences to a novel, as opposed to one-line jokes going nowhere.  When you read that opening sentence you should think, I want to know what happens next!

What I don’t like:  Sentences that are obvious copies of past winners.  Study the past winning entries, but don’t copy them.  Points for originality, and laughs.

Your sentence should be neither too short nor too long, and not too risqué.  Remember, if you win, your sentence will be read on the radio many times, often by people with short attention spans.  My shortest entry was eight words and my longest 123 words.  Neither was selected for recognition. 

And last, this contest is about bad writing.  Rather than trying to be clever, imagine an amateur writer, a person eager to write, but with limited powers of vocabulary, imagination, and description.  This person could be humble or arrogant.  Write that sentence as though you were this person.  As a judge, I’ll be looking for your entry.

 

Jim Guigli ©2022

 

Jim Guigli began writing with single sentence entries for the 2005-2006 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Jim’s Grand Prize winner was about a beautiful, mysterious woman visiting the small office of an impoverished private detective, Bart Lasiter. Though the Contest is about writing a bad opening sentence to a non-existent novel, people kept asking, “What about the rest of the book?  What happens to Bart Lasiter?”

Jim answered with the Old Town Sacramento fictional world of Bart Lasiter and Lasiter Investigations. You can learn more at http://www.jimguigli.com/  Jim lives with his writer wife and two Labrador retrievers near Sacramento.