I first heard about the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest at age ten, when I read an article in the Los Angeles Times about the third edition of the competition.  Here was the winning entry that year (1984):

The article continued, “According to Sharon Brown, one of the 14 judges, who is an English lecturer at San Jose State, the winner’s sentence had all of the aspects of bad writing that the judges sought.  It had anticlimax, wordiness, misplaced modifiers, overblown triteness and parody.”  It certainly did have wordiness, though compared to the winners of the years that followed, it’s remarkably concise.  Actually, I have nothing negative to say about the Steve Garman entry; it’s awesome, and it’s highly unlikely that I would have been running this contest for the past quarter century had I not been increasingly impressed by it every time it came to mind between the ages of ten and twenty-seven.  For it was in 2001, seventeen years after I read that article, that I started this unauthorized spinoff of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, based on the idea that while the point of that contest was to parody Bulwer-Lytton’s Victorian tendency to go on and on and on, brevity is the soul of wit, and so shorter sentences (shorter than the one I am currently writing, cer­tainly) should actually be funnier.  Little did I dream that not only would Lyt­tle Lytton still be going in 2025, but it would be the last Lytton standing⁠—for I was shocked to learn that Bulwer-Lytton Contest founder Scott Rice stopped running his competition last year.  I had assumed that after he retired, he would hand it off to his daughter or the grad students of San Jose State Uni­versity or some other designated successor, not that it would just go dark.  I still have to think that someone will revive it before too very long, but as it stands, if you’re looking for a “bad opening sentence” contest in 2025, this is the place!

As for the winner of this year’s contest⁠—in past years I have written about the importance of plausibility when considering the top spot, but thinking about the contrast with the Bulwer-Lytton Contest suggested a new aspect to what I mean by that.  Bulwer-Lytton entries weren’t supposed to fool anyone into thinking that Edward Bulwer-Lytton himself might actually have written them.  But they were supposed to be bad in the same way that Scott Rice thought Bulwer-Lytton’s writing was bad.  Similarly, I don’t think too many Lyttle Lytton winners convince visitors that they were the first sentences of real novels⁠—though the Found division demonstrates that all sorts of atroci­ties have in fact seen print.  But I do look for entries that are bad in the same way that some real writing is bad.  That’s where plausibility figures in: to the extent that an entry is implausible, is it because it exaggerates a flaw found in actual writing?  Or does the sentence have problems that we don’t really find in the real world?  Both sorts of entries do make it onto these pages, but at least for the top spot, I’m generally looking for the former.  Thus, the winner of the 2025 Lyttle Lytton Contest is:

The notion that a British author might try to set a story in Texas but uninten­tionally load it up with Britishisms⁠—“mate” to mean “friend”, “maths” instead of “math”, O‑level exams, the name “Callum”⁠—would be amusing even if it had no basis in reality, but what propelled this entry to victory is that this sort of thing has been driving me up the wall for ages.  Back in the day, I’d get my weekly batch of superhero comics, and even though the vast majority of the characters were American, many of the writers were British, and I’d always wonder, where are the editors?  Why aren’t they calling for rewrites when they see that an American character is calling something “a bit crap” or call­ing someone “a right idiot”, or that an American character is agreeing to a plan by saying “brilliant” or complaining that “I’m having trouble stopping myself yawning” (when the American phrasing would be “stopping myself from yawning”).  Just recently I saw a character who is supposed to be from Brooklyn say “soz” as short for “sorry”, and, like, we don’t do that on this side of the Atlantic.  I flipped back to see who had written this; it wasn’t someone I was familiar with, but I did some poking around and, sure enough, he’s so British that he was once an editor for BBC Magazines.  (And his name is aw­fully close to “Callum”.)  Anyway, I imagine that there will be some grumbling that this year’s imaginary trophy went to an entry that resonated with my idiosyncratic pet peeves, and for that matter, I have no idea whether Esther even had the same sorts of real dialect errors in mind or whether the idea behind the entry was more whimsical.  But one aspect of this entry that put it over the top is that this is supposed to be a contest not just for random sen­tences, but for the opening lines of imaginary novels, and this opener suggests chapter after chapter of a British author trying to capture the Texas setting and failing miserably.  “So after school I went down to the Lubbock Sains­bury’s for some choccy biscuits and a chip butty, when I saw a fit totty in the car park.  I tipped my cowboy hat to her.  ‘Howdy, innit?’”

Here’s a finalist that leans even further in the direction of an infelicitous premise rather than merely infelicitous language:

On the one hand, this seems like a topical reference, what with the craze over ChatGPT and branding everything as “AI”, but on the other, it can’t be that topical insofar as Batman has been using the Bat-Computer since 1966.

Another finalist, meanwhile, does go the tried and true “maybe you should rephrase that?” route:

I suppose that’s a double entendre, but what I like about this entry is that the double entendre doesn’t seem deliberate.  It suggests an imaginary author writing a fairly smarmy opening sentence, reaching for a cleft construction for extra emphasis, and winding up with the written equivalent of the Picasso car.

Here’s an entry along similar lines, except this time, whoopsie, the imaginary author forgot the cleft constituent:

And since we’ve started the honorary mentions with a love story, I guess we might as well continue in the same vein.  Here’s a romance for our atavistic times:

But lest you think that the above entry signals the death of science, never fear:

Why choose, though?  Here’s a tale that brings together ancient myth and the atomic age!

A couple more involving mythical beasts:

Part of the joke here is that in Greek mythology, the Minotaur was defeated by Theseus, not Heracles, and certainly not Hercules, his Roman counterpart.  Why would our imaginary author use the Giggle Time All‑Mo version?  Our third finalist gives us an answer:

There’s so much to love/hate about this one.  There’s the idea that languages can be ranked on a tier list and that such a list constitutes a sort of linguistic feudal system.  There’s the idea that Latin is the best choice of a language to dazzle Cleopatra, whose native language was Koine Greek, who was a famous polyglot who would not have been impressed by anyone’s knowledge of a sec­ond language, and who wouldn’t have been impressed by Latin in particular, a very common language in the Mediterranean world circa 50 BCE.  And then of course there’s the notion that the line that’s sure to kick off the process of sweeping her off her feet is “Hello”. 

Staying with languages:

Misidentifying France as a city is clearly meant to be the main joke here, but what I like about this one is that the dullest possible French 1A conversation is what gives the narrator such a thrill.

Not a copy-and-paste error⁠—both of these were by the same entrant.  Going two-for-two is quite a feat, though Hannah Sim used to pull it off with regularity!

But back to languages:

Longtime readers have probably noticed that I have a weak spot for a dubious apocalypse⁠—I still find myself laughing every now and then at that acid rain entry from 2016.  This one seizes upon the xenophobic hysteria right-wingers have been drumming up for⁠—well, for ages, but for the past decade in parti­cular.  “If you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country!”  And here we see that dire prediction come to pass.  And the effect is that a city in Missouri goes from having a French name to a Spanish name.  The residents of San Luis Obispo can tell you how dystopian that is.  (Actually, I just discovered that both St. Louis and San Luis Obispo are named for Frenchmen: the former for Louis IX, the latter for his great-nephew Louis of Toulouse.)

Now, if you want an apocalypse on an even grander scale, try this on for size:

Every year there’s that one entry that makes a “?!” appear above my head.  Sure enough, I just looked up and there it is.

Here’s an entry that references a real, ongoing apocalypse but uses it metaphorically:

And on the topic of finance:

That entry has some lexical overlap with this one:

The proportion of sex-themed entries has dropped dramatically since the libidinous days of 2020, and this year was actually below the baseline of the ’00s and ’10s.  Among the 2025 winners, the entry above and these two are about as explicit as it gets:

I’m assuming that V is an initial and that this entry was not sent in by the Paul V who served as Pope from 1605 to 1621.

Anyway, this is not the only entry in which things got a little stabby.  Here’s our fourth finalist:

After getting stabbed, it’s important to get patched up:

I was going to make a fairly predictable joke about how much that would cost in the U.S., but I didn’t even really know what range would be funny and what would just be accurate, so I did some poking around to see what the charge for this would be.  It looks like the range is $1100 to $5800.

Staying in the medical realm:

I will now pause while my inbox fills up with messages from red cap types insisting that while a vaccine could not stop the abuse, ivermectin could.

One subtle touch I like about the entry above is the opening phrase.  While the 2022 winner treated two very similar things as if they were diametric oppo­sites, this tries to explain how two completely dissimilar things differed “in many ways”, as if we needed that explanation.  It’s a clever bit of understate­ment.  “In many ways, a hen is unlike a hacksaw.”

That one mainly works because the imaginary author came very close to choosing the right word to describe the dinosaur but didn’t quite get there.  But this is another one in which a lot of the comedic impact relies on under­statement⁠—both of the likelihood that finding a living dinosaur would be con­sidered important, and of the period of time before it would be eclipsed by a bigger discovery.

This one interests me because it functions like a garden-path sentence even though it really isn’t one.  In a true garden-path sentence, the initial inter­pretation should be valid until a word appears that makes it impossible.  Con­sider the sentence “The police dog this neighborhood.”  I would expect that after the first three words, most readers would expect the subject of the sen­tence to be a police dog, as in a member of a K‑9 unit.  But then there’s no verb.  So readers have to re-evaluate: oh, “dog” is the verb!  The subject is the police!  Human cops are harassing people in this community!  But in the entry above, even though talking about mushing something into a fine pasty sub­stance seems to work⁠—it’s something you could do to a boiled potato, for instance⁠—it is unreasonable to think that anyone would be doing that to dogs.  As soon as we get five words in, there’s only one meaning of “mushed” that makes sense, and it must be the case that this sentence is about someone driving a dogsled team.  Except… don’t you still envision someone making a sort of canine slurry right up until you hit the word “snow”?  Even though it would be yet more understatement to call that highly unlikely?

One more with animals:

Clearly, if one cheetah can run at seventy miles per hour, then a thousand cheetahs can run at seventy thousand miles per hour.  I mean, that’s just basic math.  Or maths.  Wait⁠—do you think this is why I flunked my O‑levels?

And as long as we’re talking about math(s):

Because this is the Lyttle Lytton Contest, it is tempting to say that this entry should have ended after the “Yikes!”, but I can see how the third sentence adds something important: with just the first two sentences, this hardly seems like it could be the beginning of a novel.  But the third sentence tells us that the novel is going to be a long recounting of the events that led up to… well, up to the point that the narrator has his brain ripped out and the story presumably ends.  So, yeah, this might not have made the list without setting up that book-length flashback, even if that setup makes the entry a little long.

And if you are indeed partial to a bit of the old ultra-violence:

But after a move like that, Simon had better watch his back:

There is a very similar sentence in “The Eye of Argon” by the late Jim Theis, a Mystery Science Theater response to which was the first thing I ever posted to the Internet, back in 1995.  Here’s another one that calls “The Eye of Argon” to mind:

The purple prose, the portentous tone, and in particular, the use of “rainy fluid” in place of “rain”… it’s almost like Jim is back with us.

But speaking of drips of fluid:

In the latter entry the rain⁠—pardon me, the depressed rain⁠—is part of a simile, but several entries offered up imaginary novels that started off by following Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s lead and talking about the bad weather:

The tautology there brings us to a batch of entries that all involve repetition in some way:

There’s more to that one than just repetition, of course: there’s the shift to a colloquial register at the end, the use of “whichever” for “which”, the unnec­essary “that”, and the phrase “the painting was formed”, which for those who were around in the ’00s will call to mind a famous question about the forma­tion of babbys.  If you prefer your repetition unleavened, though, we’ve got you covered:

“Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong” is also a good description of the decor of room 212 in my freshman dorm.

There are a couple more original entries on the way, but before I get to them, let’s run through the Found division.  Here plausibility takes on a different meaning⁠—since these were all published (at least by their authors) for pur­poses other than this contest, we don’t need to ask, “Could someone really have written this in earnest?”  But there’s more to this division than just a roundup of bad writing that people happened across⁠—the question remains whether a given entry could serve as the opening line of a novel.  One way to ensure that the answer is yes is to just submit the actual opening line to something… but there’s an endless supply of terrible fanfic out there, and laughing at some eighth-grader’s first attempt at writing a story isn’t the point of this contest.  But when this entry showed up in the Lyttle Lytton inbox, it seemed to me like it hit a sweet spot.  It is the beginning of a book (apparently the first in a series of four books, each with a target length of 2200 standard pages) about a young man who “might one day become the greatest wizard in history” in the “New Monarchy Empire”, a land full of orcs, dwarves, and elves that I assume is forever at odds with the New Democracy Republic.  The opening, based purely on vibes, seems inoffensive enough⁠—just some nice scenery, right?  But if you actually read it, well…

This story is published online, and apparently it crowdsources editing sugges­tions, so in the time since this entry was submitted, the audience has already pointed out that “majestic waves” are more appropriate to oceans than rivers.  It does not appear that anyone has yet convinced the author that foam, how­ever serene, tends to interfere with transparency. 

It might seem unfair to make this the winner of the division when it doesn’t really go “CLANG!” for most readers at first glance.  But, again, that’s why I thought it made for a good entry.  If you wish the winner had a clearer “oof” to it, though, here was the other chief contender:

He really tested the limits of her wetter vestibules.

This category also had a few honorable mentions:

That’s very similar to the “ale” sentence from 2022⁠—which, I see, was also a quoted tweet!  But enough of you seem to have liked this one that I figured I’d throw it in.

At first I thought the issue here lay in the attempt to draw a parallel between the two characters’ behavior, since “motherly” is a word with a solid history behind it while “son-like” isn’t.  But now I think the bigger issue is what the sentence assumes about family dynamics.  I think my parents would attest that doing things “without question” never really fit my personal definition of “son-like”…

So, less like ketchup randomness and more like soy sauce randomness, then.

Similarly, the eagle embodies a person’s inner hooves.

True, it has indeed been at least two hundred years since humankind discov­ered the existence of diamonds and salt.  I like the opening tag, as if we’ve all been in denial about this fact and need to confront the harsh reality.

…Wait, does it say “let’s face it” because crystals have faces?  Argh.

…Wait, no⁠—does it say “let’s face it” because this is a face cleanser?  This just gets worse and worse.  I gotta get out of this category.

After computer-generated entries won the Found division in both 2021 and 2023, with ChatGPT released in between, I started a third division for those who wanted to see what the language processors came up with.  But growth in the number of computer-generated entries was flat from 2023 to 2024, and this year it actually shrank.  The quality of the LLM entries also dropped quite a bit; they were generally on the “I’m so random!!1! Wacky face emoji!” side and actually reminded me of a lot of the losing entries from the early ’00s.  But this one was pretty good, and is therefore our winner:

Compared to the computer-generated entries, there were actually more note­worthy entries in the original division that were about the rise of computer-generated content.  In addition to Aimee’s entry up near the top, there was this:

And this:

About the former entry: customized children’s books (parents sent in the kid’s name, a friend or sibling’s name, a pet’s name, and a city name, and maybe some other stuff, and some poor soul typed those things into the text of the book at the appropriate points) were already a thing back in the ’70s, but there’s a measure of gallows-humor amusement in the idea that the program will replicate the target’s “mannerisms”.  As for the latter: morbid curiosity prompted me to actually give that prompt to the free version of ChatGPT linked from openai.com.  Here’s its first paragraph: “On my sixteenth birthday, I was blissfully unaware that within a few weeks, the universe would hit the ‘reset’ button on my entire social circle.  Oblivious to the coming storm, I walked into the DMV with hope in my heart⁠—only to fail my driving test, a small humiliation before the world unraveled.”  A reasonable entry to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, if it were still running!

And while that contest has come to an end (at least for now), this one is still a going concern, so entries for the 2026 edition are now being accepted!  But I’m getting ahead of myself⁠—there’s still some 2025 business to take care of.  First up: many thanks to all the 2025 entrants!  As always, there were any number of entries that would have made the cut on a different day⁠—I have to draw a line somewhere, but there’s usually no clear gap between the last few ruled in and the last few ruled out.  If you didn’t make it this year, please try again!  Thanks also to everyone who helps spread the word about this contest, and in particular to those who help support it via my Patreon account.  And… I guess that’s about it for now.  So, as they say in Texas, cheers!