100 Years, 100 Creators – Part 7

Over a few posts, I’m choosing different creators or creative teams–novelist, composer, scriptwriter, comic book artist, etc–who have influenced or inspired me, and in most cases brought me a lot of enjoyment.

I Didn’t Win the Little Lytton Contest

The Little Lytton contest is an internet-based writing contest where the aim is to come up with the worst opening sentence to a novel that you can – with the caveat that it must be under 200 characters.  I discovered it a few years ago, and have mentioned it on the blog before.  The idea of the contest is to be “intentionally unintentionally funny” – to purposely write a few words that sound bad and accidentally funny, but which also sound like they could be the real opening sentence of a real book.

A Brief Amusement…

Recently, I discovered the existence of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest – a contest operating out of California to create the worst opening sentence of a book that you can come up with.  Related to this is the Little Lytton Contest, which is a similar thing but with limitations on how long the entry can be.