Dark and stormy starts
"Call me Ishmael"? No, far too good. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . ."? A beauty, a classicbut all wrong for the Second Annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which asks contestants to try their hand at composing truly atrocious opening sentences to hypothetical bad novels. Says San Jose State University English Professor Scott Rice: "We want the kind of writing that makes the reader say, 'Don't go on.' "
Founded by Rice, who has enlisted the assistance of fellow professors to judge the entries (some 700 so far), the contest was...
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