Low Involvement Writing
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” –Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830) An international literary parody contest, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest honors the memory of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), which has been made into a movie three times and originated the expression “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and phrases like “the almighty dollar,” Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the Peanuts beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, “It was a dark and stormy night.”
This document is a test of low involvement writing, but we need at least one sentence that’s human written.