The 2016 Lyttle Lytton Contest#
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The 2016 Winners
It all started when my topaz eyes looked up into his soft emerald ones.
1993, it is the future. Acid rain had destroyed civilization.
Eric Bauer
Post-apocalyptic fiction is of course a well-established genre. I’ve read a lot of it — particularly from the 1950s, ’60s, and ’80s, when nuclear annihilation seemed like it was just around the corner. The 1970s were a little different. It was the age of détente, and pop culture shifted away from the apocalypse and towards the dystopia, extrapolating the world’s ills into the future: overpopulation, pollution, inflation. Now, I’m not saying that acid rain wasn’t a problem! It was — it blighted forests, killed off fish, corroded statues. But still, the idea of a novel from 1974 or so sounding the alarm that in less than twenty years we will be reduced to a few last stragglers, living underground lest we dissolve in the low-pH downpour, is pretty delightful.
The usually handsome left side of my darling husband’s face spasmed a full 90 degrees into horror when I told him my little secret.
Harper Cole
Lots of things to like here, such as the way the sentence takes it as a given that the transition from handsome to horrified constitutes precisely a quarter-turn of the half-face, and that naturally no further rotation is possible. (And of course there’s the implication that the right side of the darling husband’s face may not necessarily be anything to write home about.)
Some girls never get a pony, but Jane was good and her daddy loved her.
Sasha Cornish
This is a story about an ENFP and an INTJ who fall in love.
anonymous
Myers-Briggs typology has been around for the better part of a century, but it does seem that it took the advent of the Internet and specifically the advent of things like dating sites and Tumblr “about me” sections for the types to become a core axis of identity for a broad swath of people. This entry is therefore both intrinsically amusing and a playful shot at those who take the Myers-Briggs more seriously than is warranted, given that it has no foundation in actual psychological research. But then, I would say that, being an INTJ.
“He was approximately 182.88 centimeters tall and 90.7185 kilograms,” the nice guy converted to the European police officer.
Bjorn Edstrom
On the surface, the joke here is clear: we see the word “approximately” attached to numbers that aren’t approximate at all. If we recognize where those numbers come from—that they are overly precise equivalents of “six feet” and “200 pounds”—all the better. But while I don’t know whether this is what Bjorn was going for, what made me laugh is that I actually encounter this phenomenon from time to time—for instance, I was once reading a Wikipedia article that cheerfully informed me that “On November 10, 1845, Polk sent John Slidell, a secret representative, to Mexico City with an offer of 25 million (628,942,308 today)”. Oh, and “the nice guy” is a nice touch.
“Cucks! You’re all cucks!” I passionately exclaimed.
Z. N. Travers
Here we have an entry suggesting a very bad novel indeed, given how prominently the opening features Internet racists’ new favorite word for non-racists. From time immemorial members of minority groups have been tagged with disparaging names, and it is certainly not a new phenomenon for them to attempt to fight back by coining their own disparaging terms for those outside their groups. (To pick one at random: “shiksa” apparently dates to 1892.) But when they are new, criminy, they sound stupid. A couple of years ago I learned that, at least on certain campuses, the jocks had started to make a point of dismissing non-jocks as “narps”—“narp” meaning “non-athletic regular person". Sick burn, dudes.
Torval found great pleasure in his elfin mother’s lips; edgy, huh?
Robert Jones
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
Other entries suggested authors trying really really hard to be gothic, or epic, or “street”:
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-ka’noug. 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
But while these all succumb to varying types of excess, another set of entries reflected authors trying too hard to sound professional, employing conventional phrasings that, especially in context, are eye-rollingly pat. Liz Jones submitted a Found entry from a book jacket that didn’t make the cut because it sounded too much like a book jacket and not enough like the novel itself, but it’s a very good illustration of what I’m talking about: “She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France… but invade they do.” Here are a couple more:
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
quoted by Elena Churilov
Perhaps this year’s ultimate example of trying too hard comes from another entry in the Found division:
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
quoted by Patrick Augustine
Aaron Rowden submitted this opening to an article written by Camille Paglia: “Like stumbling twin mastodons, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton fell into the abortion tar pit this past week.” That’s too specifically journalistic to sound like the beginning of a novel, but it serves as a perfect example of just how far some writers will stretch to try to kick things off with a striking comparison. So it’s no surprise that similes and other metaphors are also very popular with Lyttle Lytton entrants. Here are some of the better ones this time around:
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
The blood came pouring into her mouth like a waterfall of gore and violence.
“Blood Raining Night” on fanfiction.net
quoted by Holden Long
This just goes to show how tough it is for entrants in the Original division to top the unintentional comedy of writers who actually are doing their best. What gets me about this one is that “gore” and “violence” both fail as similes, for opposite reasons: it makes no sense to compare gore to blood because gore is blood, while violence is an abstraction. It’s like saying, “The cook poured the polenta into the pot like a waterfall of corn and nutrition.”
The calligraphy of combat is written with strokes of sudden blood.
“Monastery Swiftspear” card from Magic: The Gathering
quoted by Tanner Swett
My life is like a free online game, people seem to be playing with it.
“Conceit” on literarydevices.net
quoted by Molly G.
Her curves were the Pavlovian meat that made a man’s loins salivate.
Neil Martin
Her eyes were like deep, green pools of eyeball liquid.
Alexa Silverman
And a Found entry along lines similar to the above:
Her eyes were terribly broken, like fractured orbs of glass being frozen.
a college literary folio
quoted anonymously
Moving on to another category — every year there is a contingent of entrants who begin their imaginary novels not by diving into the story but with some sort of prefatory author’s note. This year my favorite of these was:
All characters in this novel are purely fictitious, with the exception of Dr Alpha Wiseman, whose blog posts are my own.
Nick Mathewson
The reason, you ask? The reason, I say, that you’re going to love this book, well, it’s simple. You’re going to love this book because I’m a fuckin’ wordsmith. You’re welcome.
Eric Scott
And speaking of wordsmithery, entries in which not all of the words are quite right constitute a well-represented category each year, and 2016 was no exception:
Ben slams the packet down by the Officer. “These are my kids don’t 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
The problems in that one are more than purely semantic—referring to this character as “the individual” is worth a chuckle, but parceling the action out into two separate steps is amusing in its own right. Here’s one in which the fractured syntax does the heavy comedic lifting:
Yeah, it kicks ass to be living in this high-rent apartment with my girlfriend who’s real hot and I fuck her.
Wright Allenson
Agent Felicia Stone was tough and she was smart, but she still had the emotions of a woman.
Ax Hubs
To close out the Original division, let’s turn to a mainstay of the contest: entries that you look at and just kind of go “whut”.
“How did you do that?” gasped Danielle in astonishment as Eric ran up and down the hill with astonishing speed.
Aimee L.
The repetition of “astonish” has nothing to do with why this one made the list—I just really like the mental image of the guy showing off his speed by running up and down a hill, and then of the girl standing and gaping at this amazing feat.
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
When your hand becomes steel, there is nothing you can’t punch.
Deadliest Warrior, a TV show on Spike
quoted by Sean Kermes
First of all, this suggests an awful novel to come — that it’sjust going to be someone with a steel hand wandering around punching things. But second, it isn’t even true! Like, even with a steel hand, you still can’t punch the sun. Actually, you can’t punch anything that you couldn’t punch with a regular fist; it’s just that with a steel hand you’ll do more damage and break fewer of your own hand bones. I’m surprised at this, because Spike’s programming is otherwise famous for its logical rigor.
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”
quoted by Brian Click
This entry above opens a category that was well-represented in the Found division but much less so in the Original division, namely, anticlimax. Here’s another along the same lines:
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
quoted pseudonymously
But I found this one particularly interesting:
Natasha Romanoff hated pierogies—but more than that, she hated lies.
Black Widow: Forever Red
quoted anonymously
The safest place for the unborn child is in the firmly restrained pouch of the womb.
“Seatbelts” on roadsafety.transport.nsw.gov.au
quoted by Edward Timothy
Imagine one of those Victorian novels that begin with the birth of the narrator/protagonist. Now imagine that the author elected to start things even earlier.
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
quoted by Brendan Kelley
…or even earlier still!
There are two kinds of men in the world, savvy and nosavvy.
Pokémon Vietnamese Crystal
quoted by Carter Sande
Again, by itself that’s just a pretty standard translation glitch. But, to me at least, it becomes a lot funnier when you imagine that Jane Austen followed up Sense and Sensibility with Savvy and Nosavvy.
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
quoted by Gareth Williams
Hmm, that doesn’t fit the category. I believe that means we’ve reached the lightning round.
Cancer is always bad, but in the 1960s it was worse than it is today.
Opening Skinner’s Box, chapter 6
quoted by Fionn Murray
Man, what wasn’t.
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
quoted by Lucian Smith
I bet a couple of those rays are just misunderstood.
She was cat-derived, though human in outward shape, which explains the C in front of her name.
The Ballad of Lost C’Mell
quoted by Adam T.
Good thing there are only 26 kinds of animals in the world.
“Punk” is nothing but death… and crime… and the RAGE of a BEAST.
Batman: Fortunate Son
quoted by Julie Crowley
To be fair, that’s not always true. Sometimes punk is death, and crime, and the RAGE of a BEAST, and fake British accents.
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
quoted by David Speyer
Half human and half mermaid? Doesn’t that basically mean one-quarter fish? (Which in turn means, what? That her fish tail only extends from the knees down? She still has to hop around everywhere! Inconvenient.)
“CB-99, show Lando the hologram of your file called JTHW — Jabba the Hutt’s Will!”
Zorba the Hutt’s Revenge
quoted anonymously
Come on, you have holograms but you haven’t invented long filenames? Criminy. A galaxy full of robots with human-equivalent artificial intelligence, but where filenames are concerned, they still haven’t caught up to Windows 95.
Our daughter is not quite 12 years old yet. That means she is 11.
“Why Are We Sexing Up Children?” on deeprootsathome.com
quoted by Ben Waldorf
I want to begin with an exercise, in which you, the reader, put yourself in an authorial-cum-narratorial position.
“Discourse Style Makes Viewpoint”
quoted by PTTG
There’s something going on, and it’s bad.
Donald Trump, 2016.0114 debate
quoted by Adam Cadre
And that wraps up the double-sized roundup of the 2016 winners! If you enjoy the Lyttle Lytton Contest, please consider supporting it by tossing a few cents at my Patreon account, the proceeds from which allow me to take less freelance work and devote that time to this and other projects. One recent project was publishing a new, rewritten ebook edition of my novel Ready, Okay!, so if you’re at all curious about what I get up to when I’m not curating Lyttle Lytton entries, check it out. And with the plugs out of the way—many thanks to all the entrants, as well as to the posters, rebloggers, and retweeters who help to spread the word about this contest. The 2017 edition is already underway, so I’ll see you, the reader, next year!
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