Click
here to remove commentary
|
And that was a whole lot of prefatory hair-splitting over what is ultimately just a big list of jokes, so let's get to it. The winner of the 2016 Lyttle Lytton Contest is:
It all started when my topaz eyes looked up into his soft emerald ones. |
Will McGill |
After sixteen years, it is neither easy nor necessary to come up with an entry that defies categorization. Still, before I dive into the categories, I'd like to start with a few entries that strayed from the beaten paths. We'll start with this year's runner-up:
1993, it is the future. Acid rain had destroyed civilization. |
Eric Bauer |
The usually handsome left side of my darling husbands face spasmed a full 90 degrees into horror when I told him my little secret. |
Harper Cole |
Some girls never get a pony, but Jane was good and her daddy loved her. |
Sasha Cornish |
All right, let's take a look at some of those categories. I'll start with the most diverse: those that riff on phenomena that have bubbled up in the culture, often on the Internet. For instance:
This is a story about an ENFP and an INTJ who fall in love. |
anonymous |
He was approximately 182.88 centimeters tall and 90.7185 kilograms, the nice guy converted to the European police officer. |
Bjorn Edstrom |
Cucks! Youre all cucks! I passionately exclaimed. |
Z.N. Travers |
Torval found great pleasure in his elfin mothers lips; edgy, huh? |
Robert Jones |
In any case, "edginess" is essentially a matter of trying too hard to be provocative, which brings us to our next category: entries whose imagined authors are trying too hard in various ways. One of the most popular ways is to stretch for some sort of disconcerting irony:
8:32 P.M., April 17th, 1996. Detective Fry cuts open the plastic cover on his TV dinner, while not seven miles away, a similar knife slides over the neck of an innocent man. |
Ian Lundin |
The rain thundered on the roof of the casino, washing away the grime on top, but not being able to wash away the sins within. |
Kevin Shi |
Good heavens, Jonathan murmured when he looked at the sky, for the heavens he saw were not good at all. |
Luke Fowler |
Ebony watched over the rain-wet street, her raven hair slicked by the rain. The roof was lonely, but she preferred the honest ugliness of the gargoyles to the beautiful lies of her shallow friends. |
Roisin o'Hare |
It was a time of darkness in the land of Gath-kanoug. But then, out of the darkness, there shone a brilliant light. And the name of that light was: Horick the Elf. |
Marc Silcox |
Call me Bastardo Medio, for my costume is black, my skin is pasty white, and I am one muy malo hombre. |
pseudonymous |
Amy was not going to be the only girl in her seventh-grade class without a boyfriend, and she knew just how to get one. |
Duncan Stevens |
The cyborg was loose in the alien ship, and it was clear from the gunshots that he was not here in the name of peace. |
Crystal Society, chapter 29 |
Picture a drop of water balancing on a leaf, or a Zen master poised on one foot — mid-air — for what seems an eternity. NFL referee and Omaha attorney Clete Blakeman maintains his own special equilibrium. |
"Omaha! Omaha!" on omahamagazine.com |
They were ensnared, their limp limbs bound together like a bunch of Twizzlers that had melted in the sun. |
Michelle Vongkaysone |
Blood was bursting from her arm like melted red rockets. |
Sally |
Here's a Found entry in a similar vein (no pun intended):
The blood came pouring into her mouth like a waterfall of gore and violence. |
"Blood Raining Night" on fanfiction.net |
The calligraphy of combat is written with strokes of sudden blood. |
"Monastery Swiftspear" card from Magic: The Gathering |
This next one was actually designed as a model simile for aspiring writers!:
My life is like a free online game, people seem to be playing with it. |
"Conceit" on literarydevices.net |
Here are a couple more entries from the Original division that metaphorically went to the well of metaphor:
Her curves were the Pavlovian meat that made a mans loins salivate. |
Neil Martin |
Her eyes were like deep, green pools of eyeball liquid. |
Alexa Silverman |
Her eyes were terribly broken, like fractured orbs of glass being frozen. |
a college literary folio |
All characters in this novel are purely fictitious, with the exception of Dr Alpha Wiseman, whose blog posts are my own. |
Nick Mathewson |
These meta entries are often exercises in self-aggrandizement:
The reason, you ask? The reason, I say, that youre going to love this book, well, its simple. Youre going to love this book because Im a fuckin wordsmith. Youre welcome. |
Eric Scott |
Ben slams the packet down by the Officer. These are my kids dont you see? His own dear flesh, his dear old blood. |
Lauren McNaughton |
Gunther sashayed across the street one day and heard the cry of a gun. |
Daria Bates |
The individual stroked his mustache, following it up with a stroke to his beard. |
Daniel Heddendorf |
Yeah, it kicks ass to be living in this high-rent apartment with my girlfriend whos real hot and I fuck her. |
Wright Allenson |
This next one, on the other hand, makes it onto the list of winners because it encapsulates the imaginary author's attitudes in a way that is not only plausible, but that not too long ago would have made very few people even blink:
Agent Felicia Stone was tough and she was smart, but she still had the emotions of a woman. |
Ax Hubs |
How did you do that? gasped Danielle in astonishment as Eric ran up and down the hill with astonishing speed. |
Aimee L. |
The boy had a bounce in his step and a certain marsupiality of the face; we called him Kanga. But the girl, oh ho ho ho the girl, her we just called Jennifer the Bitch. |
Dylan |
Okay, on to what remains of the Found category, starting with this year's winner:
When your hand becomes steel, there is nothing you cant punch. |
Deadliest Warrior, a TV show on Spike |
Outwardly, they maintained the appearances of proper, educated Christians, but behind closed doors, they engaged in love triangles, in-fighting, drug use, and bad financial investments. |
"Untangling the Tale of the Seven Sutherland Sisters and Their 37
Feet of Hair" |
LONDON — It has seemed, almost, a land of two narratives, one in fear of jihad, the other confronting an older hazard: rain. |
"Rattled by Terror and Floods, Britain Enters Era of No Quick Fixes"
on nytimes.com |
Natasha Romanoff hated pierogies — but more than that, she hated lies. |
Black Widow: Forever Red |
The Found division always requires a bit of extra sifting, because a lot of people tend to just submit sentences that are amusingly bad, rather than sentences that would make amusing openings to bad novels. Here are a few that I thought worked well in their new context:
The safest place for the unborn child is in the firmly restrained pouch of the womb. |
"Seatbelts" on roadsafety.transport.nsw.gov.au |
Reproduction is necessary for life and most of us have a preference for when and where we reproduce. |
a biology paper written by the entrant's friend |
There are two kinds of men in the world, savvy and nosavvy. |
Pokémon Vietnamese Crystal |
The nights were getting longer and the days were getting shorter, and on the plane, there was a bomb! |
a story the entrant wrote at age seven |
Cancer is always bad, but in the 1960s it was worse than it is today. |
Opening Skinner's Box, chapter 6 |
Painted on the ceiling shines the red sun of Valmar that lights up the dark nights of vampires like you with its eight evil rays. |
Darkiss, English translation |
She was cat-derived, though human in outward shape, which explains the C in front of her name. |
The Ballad of Lost C'Mell |
Punk is nothing but death… and crime… and the RAGE of a BEAST. |
Batman: Fortunate Son |
Ever since discovering that she was half human and half mermaid, Merliah Summers life had become an amazing adventure both above and below the waves! |
Barbie in A Mermaid Tale |
CB-99, show Lando the hologram of your file called JTHW — Jabba the Hutts Will! |
Zorba the Hutt's Revenge |
Our daughter is not quite 12 years old yet. That means she is 11. |
"Why Are We Sexing Up Children?" on deeprootsathome.com |
Actually, that kind of over-explanation does make up a category of its own most years; this year, that category also includes this entry:
I want to begin with an exercise, in |
"Discourse Style Makes Viewpoint" |
(2) The over-explanation that you out there reading this sentence are, in fact, the reader makes for a nice contrast to our final item, a lovely bit of under-explanation that, the moment I heard it, I knew would be my own contribution to this year's contest. Imagine the novel that starts like this:
Theres something going on, and its bad. |
Donald Trump, 2016.0114 debate |