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TheRules
Electronic
Submissions
Lyttony
of
GRAND PRIZE
WINNERS
Penguin
Collections of Contest Entries [Out of Print (Gasp!)]
Paul
Clifford, Ch. I
Bulwer-Lytton
Page
Bulwer-Lytton's
Ancestral Estate
Sticks
and Stones [Updated: 4/5/08]
The
Eye of Argon (a Sci-Fi conference classic)
Dead
White Guys
Dead
Dogs
Elmore Leonard unknowingly critiques Bulwer-Lytton
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"The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it."--Bulwer-Lytton
Bulwer-Lytton's Bicentennial Birthday Celebration at Knebworth House, May 20-23, 2003. Pictures
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| Literary Locales
Over 1,350 picture links to places that figure in the lives and writings of famous authors
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 | Shakespearean insult? | |
GOOGLE! Go to the Google search engine, type in "Fiction Contest," and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky."
STICKS AND STONES:
For real, honest-to-Gawd, not-made-up Lyttonian wonders (that is, sentences by published authors), go Here. [Updated 4/5/08]
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.
"DARK AND STORMY NIGHT" COCKTAIL from the Swig Bar in San Francisco: Pour ginger beer into a highball glass and top with Zaya rum. | |
"In silence, and at night, the Conscience feels that life should soar to nobler ends than Power."
--Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu
Give our man credit: sometimes he could get off a good one. | |
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
Department of English
San Jose State University
San Jose, CA 95192-0090, or
To
inflict your BLFC entry electronically, digitally stimulate
Bulwer's nasal member (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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