The 2024 Lyttle Lytton Contest
Welcome to the 2024 edition of the Lyttle Lytton Contest. This is the first year that entries generated by programs such as ChatGPT have been separated out into their own division; I was surprised to find that the increase in such entries from previous years, when computer-generated entries were included with the found entries, was negligible. We’ll get to those spinoff divisions in a bit, but let’s start with the main event. The winner of the 2024 Lyttle Lytton Contest is:
As I explain almost every year, this is not just a “write a funny sentence” contest: one of my criteria in deciding which entries will make it onto this page is my sense that some author out there could plausibly have tried starting a novel this way, and not as a joke. I’m not quite as concerned about that for the honorable mentions, but for the winner, it’s very important. And this year’s winner… I have to admit that when I was sixteen, I could have written this, and I would have thought that it was great . That was the year I wrote a story in which a character’s voice “sparkled with strawberry overtones”, after all. So here we go: what’s sharp? A lemon! A lemon tastes sharp! So the sound of the door is like a lemon! But it will be confusing to the reader if I don’t specify that it’s the sound that I’m comparing to a lemon! So it’s an acoustic lemon! And… I mean, the phrase “acoustic lemon” is completely ridiculous, but I can absolutely see how an aspiring writer could get there. So there was no agonizing over choosing a winner this year: this entry arrived quite early in the 2024 submission window, I flagged it as the current leader, and even the best entries to arrive over the course of the next eleven months never challenged it.
When the Egyptians first discovered a method to preserve bodies (known as mummification), he knew this was what he wanted for himself when his time came.
