Seattle author Molly Ringle has some advice for 2011 Bulwer-Lytton winners. Ringle, you might remember, won the bad writing contest last year for this sweetly awful sentence. She was one of this year’s judges and offers some sage words on her blog. “All of you will likely hear from the media—journalists are writers too, so they love this contest,” she writes. “Also, you will quickly learn that the world is made up of two kinds of people: those who get the Bulwer-Lytton contest, and those who do not. The former will think you are freaking awesome. The latter will not understand why you’re happy the world is picking on your writing, and they’ll probably also think you actually wrote and published a novel that begins with your winning sentence.”
Gerry, the Powell’s bookseller who blogs for the book distributor Partners West, meanwhile, questions whether this year’s winning sentence is really that bad. “I’ll give this year’s winner credit for originality,” he writes, “but I’ve seen far worse lines in the openings of a great deal of the self-published and print-on-demand novels that wash up on my desk.”