Blogger: Wendy Lawton
Last week I invited you to come up with the worst first sentence with which to open a book in our Best of the Worst Contest. Goodness! You are a creative community indeed. We had 206 entries and comments. My team had the hardest time coming to a consensus on the best of the worst. Each entry was awful in its own unique way. We had to work diligently to separate the brilliantly bad from the solidly awful.
We ended up with four clear winners but a whole slew of dishonorable mentions for one reason or another. First of all, let me name some who deserved special dishonor:
- Beth McKinney and her Dukes of Hazard entry for a category I’ll call A Metaphor Too Far.
- Paula for coming up with a hilariously bad first sentence for the self-published book on writing. Awkward, Indeed.
- Tessa Afshar for Awful Alliteration.
- Cheryl Malandrinos for a Too Good to be Bad opener for Middle Grade.
- Donnie Nelson for Twisted Logic.
- Shirlee Abbott for Not Only Bad but Painfully Long.
- Sharyn Kopf for writing a Splendidly Bad Sentence that got Air Supply stuck in the heads of everyone who read her entry. *I’m all out of love. . .*
So, without further ado, the winners are. . .
Her blood-red lips glistened into a grin as she tossed her ebony eyes over her shoulder and hit the hunk hunkering behind her, and he tossed his blue eyes back at her, eyes that glistened like limpid pools into the depths of his soul, and they both wondered what this exchange of eyes might mean, but hers were too small for him and his too big for her. —Susan Roach [contemporary romance]
I hatched from good, solid stock, the first in my litter of larvae, born on a bad, browning banana…but already, my transience tamped down, a thick smog of sorrow on my gossamer wings. —Becky Jones [Fruit Fly Memoir]
A journey of loss begins with a single step, and they say morticians can do wonders these days, but how was I to know that when we were on the shark-fishing boat and they said “Toss the chum overboard!” they were talking about bait? —Andrew Budek-Schmeisser [Narrative Nonfiction]
Six months old, and already their love had picked up memories like lint, which, now that Maddie thought about it, was appropriate, since she and Brian met at the laundromat, when Maddie found herself hampered by a stubborn washing machine coin slot, but then snickered at the thought of being “hampered” while doing laundry, and then found herself explaining her snicker to the nearest laundromat patron, who turned out to be Brian and who, better yet, turned out to have a sense of humor even, well, dryer than her own. — Kirsten Wilson [“Clean” Romance]
I put together Readers’ Gift Baskets as prizes– filled with great books from some of my favorite clients, tea, and of course, chocolate. The four winners above– Susan, Becky, Andrew and Kirsten– need to send their mailing addresses to me at representation @ booksandsuch.com so I can send your prize to you. (You will need to remove the spaces from the email address and ignore the auto response you’ll receive.)
I would encourage all of those who entered to send your sentence on to the Bulwer-Lytton competition. And to each of you played, we thank you for giving us great guffaws of laughter.
Would you care to comment on the entries chosen? Tell me why you think I found them brilliantly bad. What do we learn from crafting one of these sentences?
TWEETABLE:
See the best of the worst first sentences. Too much fun! Click to Tweet
My goodness. I am so honored that my first contest win was for something so awful. Thanks for the fun, Wendy. I laughed a lot reading everyone’s creativity. Now, if I can just write as good of a sentence as this one was bad to open my real MS …
Congratulations on being so bad. 😉
Yay, Susan! Although, I don’t understand why yours was so bad. I had a picture of eyeballs flying, causing bloody lips and swollen eye sockets. That was what you meant, right?;)
Susan, One of the reasons I rolled my eyes at yours was because we still get way too many submissions that read like this. Good going. We learn good from identifying bad, right?
And sometimes, by writing the bad ourselves, thinking its good, and then learning … um, no, not so much. I love this journey. Thanks for the fun.
Congratulations, everyone! And thank you for such a fun challenge, Wendy! I had a blast with this! They all made me laugh out loud. And I still think that Kirsten’s has “darling,” in the worst way, written all over it!! Grin!
Aw shucks, Shelli! Thanks!
Any time, Kirsten!! 🙂
Shelli,
I have to say, your gorilla regurgitation entry was among the most memorable. Loved it.
Yeah, if I could have overcome my gag reflex, that one could have been a winner. (I’m the one who can’t stop gagging when I see someone spit on the ground. Too vivid an imagination.)
Thank you, Susan! I so enjoyed writing it!
Wendy, my husband is like that, too. I get the glorious job of all spit-up clean-up! So … mine was SOOO bad, I couldn’t win! I’ll take that! Grin. But … in all fairness, your bus did regurgitate!! Ha! You really inspired me!
And Susan, you wouldn’t believe the time I took to research … do gorillas chew cud? Or just do this awful procedure? There are even pictures/videos on-line of this occurrence! What a nightmare! Don’t watch it. 🙂
Kirsten’s fits my A Metaphor Too Far category. But it was too much fun not to spotlight.
As you can tell, this was highly subjective. Almost any one of these entries could be a winner– each for a different reason.
Thank you so much for holding this contest, Wendy – it brought a lot of fun, and was a challenge. (Winning is kinda cool, too!)
I loved Beth’s ‘Dukes’ entry – it’s one that stuck in my head, perhaps because my adopted family is rabidly partisan to Chrysler/Dodge products, and that show went through Chargers like popcorn.
My efforts were broadly divided into two groups (with some crossover)- sentences that were technically bad, and those that showed a deeper and more profound rot in their very conception.
The process was, for me, something like writing convincing dialogue in dialect. Catching the music of something really bad was elusive. It was easy to go over the top, or to be settle into an ox-like subtlety which sank into stagnancy.
Uh, oh. The paragraph above was written straight, and it could have been an entry.
I knew you were going to win, Andrew. You have a twistedly creative mind. 😉
Jeanne, I knew Andrew would have to win, too! I thought about Jaws all day long … still thinking on it!
Yay!!!
Now, umm, my birthday is coming up, so maybe just re-route the shipping up north, eh?
Come on!!
Your entry– like the Fruit Fly memoir– was not exactly bad. It was what I called brilliantly bad. You caught the voice of narrative nonfiction, an adventure story, but the premise was the part that was too fun not to pick. Nothing like a play on words.
The fruit fly memoir totally cracked me up because Becky Jones played it straight. She nailed memoir voice. And the fly’s angst about his own transience was quintessentially memoir-ish. But the fact that she chose the least important creature on earth and gave him this self-important, navel-gazing memoir voice totally undid me.
Wendy, this was such a fun contest. And yes, I laughed out loud at a number of the entries. 🙂 The winners are all deserving! I had fun trying to craft bad sentences, but I obviously need some practice. 😉
Honey, be glad you can’t write bad!!
That’d make a nice tattoo.
Yours were excellent Jeanne. I pored over several. (Our group is just too good.)
As a long-time fan of the particular sort of warped brilliance that the Bulwer-Lytton contest represents, I am truly honored to be named a winner here. Thanks, Wendy! And thank you for turning last Tuesday into such an entertaining romp through delightfully bad writing.
Thanks goes to our amazing blog community. We’ll have to devise another diabolical exercise.
Congrats to everyone!:)
Congratulations to all the winners, and dishonourable mentions.
I’m going to go cry like a 13 year old girl locked out of a One Direction concert.
Okay not really, maybe I’ll just go raid the Easter chocolates I hid because I didn’t hide it from my kids.
WHAT? And no one else does that?
I felt like crying, too, Jennifer. Hee hee! And I took a Robin Egg from my daughter. She’ll keep the candy in her room for a year, never eat it, it’ll go bad, something is not quite right with the child … so I did her a favor, really.
Yes, you did. You’re a good mother, Shelli. And why waste all that lovely serotonin???
Shelli, I have one like that too. He likes candy, but he either forgets about it, or his brother sneaks it and then we discover it months later. 🙂 Maybe I should follow your example….. 😉
Jeanne … we took the best iced sugar cookies to our 5th grade Sunday school class Easter Sunday. One left over, I purposely saved it for my oldest daughter (the youngest sits in the class with us, so she already had one). Get home, she takes a couple of bites, then puts it in a Ziploc bag in the frig. Today, I asked, “Are you going to eat this? Because it is going to ruin if you don’t. And it is too good to let ruin. If you don’t eat it, I will.” She ate it. Rats!
Jennifer, I charged my son a “fee” of Easter candy for changing his light bulb and bringing him a drink of water. I told him it was my payment for waitressing and hardware supply.
Susan, I like the way you think….. 😉
THAT is creative parenting! Or as they say in the legal field, extortion, but hey, why get caught up in semantics? Right?
Jennifer, Jennifer. . .
I should have made you help with the judging. You’d be hitting the chocolates for sure.
Umm, why do people say my name twice? Jeanne did it last week…wait…it’s because I’m THAT awesome, people need to repeat it to get it all in, right?
Although, I get the double name thing when people are annoyed…huh…TOTAL coincidence.
Right?
Wendy, I can see how having a chocolate fountain would make judging soooooo much nicer….
Jennifer gets the double name thing with the simultaneous shake of the head! You just can’t see that part in print! 🙂
I guess it actually ought to be three times with a sigh. Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer. . . sigh.
…followed by a soft, and caring “Let us all bow in prayer for Mary Keeley…”
Congrats to the winners!
Wendy, this was such a fun contest, and great to bring on a good belly laugh! The good thing about not winning is that I can safely say that nothing I have written has been publicly dishonered. I’m sure if I scrounged up my first ms, it would deserve plenty of dishoner though. LOL. I knew nothing about writing except to aim for 80K words. 🙂
When I won that contest way back then, I excitedly called my mother to tell her. She got real quiet and then asked, “Which of your books had the bad sentence?” Poor thing, she didn’t know I was deliberately bad.
I imagine your mother might have been a little worried because you were excited over bad writing. LOL. 😉
I’m thrilled to have been bad enough to make the dishonorable mentioned list. Thanks for putting up the contest. It was a lot of fun!
And thanks for playing. You gave people some wonderful laughter.
These made me laugh out loud! I missed your original post, it must have been when I was out if town, so I’m going to go read all the comments. What a fun contest!
I think we were together at Mount Hermon, Angela, when it came out.
Mount Hermon was last week?! I’m still trying to absorb all that happened there.
Praying you’re renewed and rejuvenated by time spent with family this week Wendy. You are so loved by the Lord.
Yes, that explains it. I could never get my wi-fi working there 🙂
Congrats to the winners!
I am not surprised that Andrew won. However, I am surprised that Cynthia did not win. I was crying and laughing on at thse same time on some of hers.
I hope Books and Such will do something like this again. It was so much fun.
They say good things can come in threes and I was hoping on receiving good news that I won today. However, yesterday I found out from the Copyright Office that they granted me a copyright on a project that I created and was involved with. Now I have my authorship. On Saturday, I found out that an entry I submitted for a contest for a national brand (the company is in my home State) is in the top 10 and will now be voted on by the public (yes its been on the news especially where I am at). There were over 15000 original entries and one could only enter once and the database only took the first original entry. I am still numb from that (kinda like Jennifer was when Mary offer her representation). It involved words but not writing.
Don’t know what the third good thing will be yet.
Wow, that’s awesome! Congratulations!
Yay, Lori!!
And, Of course, I knew Cynthia could write brilliantly bad if she wanted to– I just love her writing too much to highlight the bad. 🙂 I’m guessing her next book will be titled Turgid.
How fun about your contest win! That’s impressive. We’ll stay tuned to find out your #3.
Haven’t won yet. Only in the top ten. Only one can win the grand prize, the other nine will win a nice consolation prize.
It’s a series, actually. Turgid, Torpid, and Torrid. Romantic Comedy. 🙂
Those are a hoot! Congratulations to all the loser–er, winners!
I know! It’s hard to explain that you won by writing really, really bad.
Congrats to all the winners and thanks for all the laughs last week! Well deserved on the awfully bad writing 🙂
My friend, LeAnne Benfield Martin just posted this Anna Quindlen quote on FB:
“I’ve discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.”
Thanks for the (dis)honorable mention! 🙂
Among the winners, I have to say that I knew Susan Roach nailed it as soon as I read it 🙂 which got me thinking about inappropriate actions taken by eyeballs, which led me to writing mine 🙂
Thanks, Paula. Yours made me laugh, too. This sure was fun.
Aghh, this totally made my afternoon! Thanks, Wendy.!
And I agree, there were waaaay too many fun entries tossed in.
Thanks for the invitation to write terribly…cathartic. 😉
Congratulations to the winners. You all did great with your awful submissions. What I really loved about these is that the writers stuck to their themes, dug deep down into the ridiculous side of overwriting and came up with stellar offerings.
Thanks for the dishonorable mention. I’m truly honored.
Or is it DIShonored? 🙂 Love the snippets – rolling eyeballs and all.
The fruit fly entry was a work of genius. But I worry for Becky Jones. Won’t the fruit flies get to the chocolate and make themselves very sick? Won’t chocolate shorten their already short life spans? To spare Becky and her fruit flies, I volunteer to take the chocolate off her hands.
You.
Are.
SO.
KIND!!
😉
Ha, touché! My 22-month-old is just a bit bigger than a fruit fly…and likes chocolate too!
Somehow I missed out on the competition, but I do love the floating body parts. And the fruit fly memoir is a hoot. This is a creative bunch indeed. Now I’ll have to go back to the original post and read all the entries. Congratulations to all the winners and participants.
So I went back and read all the entries and comments, compliments, roars of laughter and groans of disgust. What a hoot! No wonder you had a difficult time picking only four.