Try writing something so dizzyingly atrocious
Garrison Spik, 41, has won the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a competition so esteemed that the top prize comes with a monetary award in the low three figures. It is given to the person who fashions the most wretched opening sentence to an imaginary novel.

Spik’s offering was wondrously, tantalisingly, mesmerisingly bad: “Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped ‘Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.’ ” “It’s challenging to write something that’s intentionally bad,” said Spik, from Washington. “You have to know the mechanics of English to be able to throw a monkey wrench into it.”

The competition is named after Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, a 19th-century English writer whose novel Paul Clifford opens with the immortal line that most people associate with Snoopy: “It was a dark and stormy night.”

While Spik won the main prize, for which he will receive $250, Bulwer-Lytton has winners in a variety of classifications. For instance, Robert B. Robeson of Lincoln, Nebraska, won in the detective category with an opening sentence that began: “Mike Hummer had been a private detective so long he could remember Preparation A.”
_CLYDE HABERMAN, NYT