Worst Fiction

Every year, the Bulwer-Lytton contest dredges up the worst (and some of the funniest) opening lines for fiction. Have a good laugh at some of this year's winners, then give it a whirl yourself.

Winner: Adventure

The blazing equatorial sun beat down on Simon’s head and shoulders as he dug feverishly in the hot sand with the ivory shoe-horn his mother had given him before the homecoming game with Taft, when the field was so wet that he’d lost his low-tops seven times in the cold sucking mud.

Adam McDonough
Reedsburgh, Wi

Winner: Children’s Literature

“Please Mr. Fox, don’t take your magic back to the forest, it is needed here in Twigsville!” pleaded little Isabel, but Mr. Fox was unconcerned as he smugly loped back into the woods without answering a word knowing well that his magic was only going to be used to make sure his forest would be annexed into the neighboring community of Leaftown where the property values were much higher.

Pete Watkins
Broken Arrow, OK

Winner: Purple Prose

The dark, drafty old house was lopsided and decrepit, leaning in on itself, the way an aging possum carrying a very heavy, overcooked drumstick in his mouth might list to one side if he were also favoring a torn Achilles tendon, assuming possums have them.

Scott Davis Jones
Valley Village, CA

Winner: Vile Puns

It was a risky production unlike any mounted prior on the Met stage, the orchestra first imitating the perpetually beating heart of a man walled-in while in pursuit of wine , and then a soprano singing the plaintive aria of a barely alive woman stuffed up a chimney as her ancestral home was destroyed; however, it certainly was Opera Poe.

Amy Torchinsky
Greensboro NC

Winner: Western

He walked into the bar and bristled when all eyes fell upon him -- perhaps because his build was so short and so wide, or maybe it was the odor that lingered about him from so many days and nights spent in the wilds, but it may just have been because no one had ever seen a porcupine in a bar before.

Linda Boatright
Omaha, NE

Now it's your turn. See what kind of wretched prose you can write. One sentence only, but please make it as long and awkward as possible.