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Daily Quick Break: March 6, 2008: Funny Terrible Bad Opening Paragraphs of Novels Contest

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Some of the funniest deliberately bad starting paragraphs of would be novels.The Bulwer-Lytton literary parody contest is a yearly contest that seeks to find the worst deliberately terrible opening paragraphs to novels. It was named after Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), who originated the phrases “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and “pursuit of the almighty dollar.” He also opened a novel in 1830 with those now famous words that Snoopy plagiarized for years, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Here are some of the best worst bad novel beginning paragraph entries in the 2006 contest.

The McCain boys strode off proudly to fight in the Civil War, one for the Union and one for the Confederacy, neither of them giving a single thought to who would play them in the television movie of their story, which would be decided more than a hundred years later by 20-something casting agents who kept getting the Civil War and World War II mixed up.

Carmen Fought
Diamond Bar, CA

When Debbie decided that Salt ‘n’ Pepper Beard was the most attractive pirate on the ship, she realized that choosing him was due to the advice of Sylvia, her new Life Coach, to be realistic about her own age and to open herself up to romance where it lay, unlike the troublesome past where she would have wished that only the younger pirates take advantage of her.

Jim Guigli
Carmichael, CA

If Gilbert had known then what he knew now, he would have seen that the dilemma facing him–to do a good deed for the wrong reason or to do a bad deed for the right reason–had long ago been shown to be two sides of the same coin by the philosopher known as Theragora of Crete even though he was not from Crete at all, but from Malta, which of course was not called Malta when Theragora was there.

To read the rest, go to: Funny Terrible Bad Opening Paragraphs of Novels Contest

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