Published: July 20, 2006 04:26 pm            

Being the baddest, Winning at being bad

“The day was like any other, except that this was a Wednesday so it was really only like 1/7th of the other days.”

Confused yet? Well, that’s the point.

Writer Randy Wilson was striving for the worst when he wrote that line. He succeeded, winning a (dis)honorable mention in a national writing contest for bad one-line openings.

The New Albany resident recently received a (dis)honorable mention in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

“To me, it was a victory, as it had been my goal for the past three years of entering,” Wilson said, who submitted 20 entries in the 2006 contest.

The contest is in its 24th year and is based out of the English Department at San Jose State University. It began in 1982 with only three entries and is named after Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, famous for the cliched opener, “It was a dark and stormy night.” Now Scott Rice, the contest founder and English professor, receives thousands of entries each year.

“The more the merrier. The best thing we ever did was let people who enter the contest run the contest,” Rice said. “It provides a painless way for people who like to read to try their hand at writing.”

Writers are asked to submit the worst one sentence openers on the contest’s official Web site that boasts, “Where www means wretched writers welcome.” Entries are due on April 15, “a date that Americans associate with painful submissions and making up bad stories,” according the Web site.

Wilson, a New Albany High School and IU Southeast graduate, has participated in the contest for three years. He discovered the contest on yahoo.com where the results from the 2002 contest were posted.

“Inspiration, if you can call it that, usually hits me when I am not focusing on anything in particular,” Wilson said. “This happens most often when I am in the shower or in the middle of the night if I’m not able to sleep. I just try to remember what I found to be humorous and get it down at my first convenience. I figure if I can’t recall it, it wasn’t really that funny to begin with.”

The entry that awarded Wilson the (dis)honorable mention wasn’t the writer’s favorite.

“Of all my entries I felt least confident in that one,” Wilson said. “I guess that goes to show how bad my sense of humor truly is. But then, it is a worst writing contest, not a humor contest.”

Wilson doesn’t limit his writing to bad opening lines. He started an annual Halloween event based on his mystery writing in 1998 with friends and family. Every year he writes an interactive murder mystery where friends and family dress as the characters in the novel and try to solve the murder.

“I often wonder as I write if anybody really cares,” Wilson said. “Not that I truly write for others — even my mysteries, which are specifically written for an audience, are more a means for me to express my creative side which I don’t get to use normally in my work.”

Wilson has already submitted four entries for the 2007 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest and plans to continue writing bad one-liners.

Winning entry: Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the 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.

-Jim Guigli, Carmichael, CA

Wilson’s (dis)honorable mention: The day was like any other, except that this was a Wednesday so it was really only like 1/7th of the other days.

Wilson’s other entries:

(His favorite) Gerald could feel the icy grip of doom — or at least what he believed to be doom, for he could not be certain as fear, despair, and abominable snowmen might also have icy grips and are just as likely to be found in this part of the Himalayas. Happiness is a word that could never be used to describe my sister, Ness-partly because she's never happy, but mostly because it is a noun and not an adjective.



The clues led Detective Sanchez into the city's dank underbelly, filled with two-bit hussies, tawdry ladies of the night, and exotic dancers looking for a quick buck-or at least that's what he told Mrs. Sanchez when she caught him staggering out of Lucky's strip club, half-dressed and accompanied by two "pieces of evidence."



The story you are about to read is true, and thus fairly boring, so I’ll try to get through it quickly.

 

Harold the Hippopotamus didn’t walk down to Bucky Beaver’s Best Dam Breakfast Buffet to have his usual meal of fried catfish and hash browns as he was having a bad anthropomorphism day, and preferred instead to slosh around in the river and capsize boats.

 

After retiring, Delbert spent his days driving his rusted green tractor through the barren fields of central Indiana that his parents once owned, reminding himself of his better, younger years and plowing over the occasional barnyard animal of Farmer Johnson, the new owner of the property.

 

The crimson dragon's fiery breath ignited the dry-rotten wood that formed the many disheveled houses of the village, leaving the townsfolk scurrying for cover, but creating an opportunity for the struggling "I Survived the Dragon's Wrath" T-shirt industry.

Contest information and rules

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

www.bulwer-lytton.com

A Couple Rules (from website)

1. Each entry must consist of a single sentence, but you may submit as many entries as you wish.

2. Sentences may be of any length (though you go beyond 50 or 60 words at your peril), and entries must be “original” (as it were) and previously unpublished.

3. Entries can be submitted by mail or email.

4. Entries will be judged by categories, from “general” to detective, western, science fiction, romance, and so. There will be overall winners as well as category winners.

5. Entries are accepted every day of the year.

6. The official deadline is April 15.

        

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