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Worst first line contest

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By June ⋅ July 2, 2007 ⋅ Post a comment

“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.”

This was the 2006 winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest…aka, the worst first line of a novel contest. I heard about it on NPR yesterday morning and remembered it this morning when I heard a song on my ipod begin with “I write mostly on hotel paper…”

This is a 2006 runner-up in the adventure category: “She looked at her hands and saw the desiccated skin hanging in Shar-Pei wrinkles, confetti-like freckles, and those dry, dry cuticles–even her “Fatale Crimson” nail color had faded in the relentless sun to the color of old sirloin–and she vowed if she ever got out of the Sahara alive, she’d never buy polish on sale at Walgreen’s again.”

C’mon Aly…you know you want to enter!

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Discussion

8 comments for “Worst first line contest”

  1. There are times in every woman’s life when she wishes she were a man — when it’s that time of the month, when it’s after dark and her car is parked three blocks away and she forgot her nunchucks, when she begins to grow facial hair — but Diane wishes she were a man every Thursday at 3 PM.

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  2. Man… I dunno. I kind of want to keep reading that one.

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  3. Shouldn’t it be something more like, “On the breezy summer day, I reached into my napsack and plucked out a piece of fruit which exploded juicily in my eating hole, causing me to burst out laughing until I realized that it was not a piece of fruit, but a HUMAN HEAD!”

    I admit it. I stole that. Sort of.

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  4. [Cerise dives for her Laurell K. Hamilton novels.]

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  5. I came to Oxnard as a young man, but I left 3 weeks and 42 minutes later as a young man who knows a thing or two more about life than the young man who had come to Oxnard earlier that month: wise things.

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  6. Sooo….

    Are you back?

    How was Italy?

    Did Gretchen’s pregnancy keep Italian men from hitting on her?

    Doubt it.

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  7. We knew mother and father began distancing themselves when he stopped claiming her flatulance.

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  8. We have a winner!

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