The 2011 Lyttle Lytton

In the Lyttle Lytton Contest, entrants are challenged to come up with deliberately bad beginnings to novels. The 2011 winners are out!

The Lyttle Lytton differs from the rather more famous Bulwer-Lytton Contest in that the Lyttle Lytton stresses brevity. How much subtle badness can you pack into a short space? (For the 2012 contest, the limit is 200 characters.)

The 2011 winners range from typically bad sentences:

Cowboy Bret said to Dave (another cowboy), “Now let’s rustle up these cattles.”

To subtle oddness:

He, from a physical stature, was short.

And include a well-done takedown of an entire style of genre writing:

I passed the fledgling plastic to the checkout chick. “Cred?” she said.

And one that I cannot read out loud without laughing:

Princess Amabel brushed her silky golden hair and tried not to think about my breasts.

All in all, a highly successful year.