Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2587 you were invited to submit an opening to an imaginary novel so magnificently bad that it would repel any would-be reader. This is an unashamed rip-off of the hugely popular annual Bulwer-Lytton contest, which honours the memory of the 19th-century writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose novel
In Competition No. 2586 you were invited to submit a convincing apology, on behalf of the banking industry, for the financial meltdown. Overall, the standard was high. Basil Ransome-Davies went into contrition overdrive, managing to cram no fewer than 16 impressively insincere-sounding instances of the word ‘sorry’ into his entry. By ‘sorry’ number seven I
In Competition No. 2585 you were invited to submit the memoirs of ten famous figures from history or ten well-known fictional characters, using only six words. In response to a ten-dollar bet that he couldn’t write a six-word short story, Hemingway came up with the haunting mini-masterpiece ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’. Which, as
Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2584 you were invited to contribute to the wave of Darwin mania sweeping the globe by submitting limericks to mark the bicentenary of the naturalist’s birth. Limerick comps are guaranteed to pull in the punters and this one prompted a flood of biblical proportions, with a
In Competition No. 2583 you were invited to provide an extract from one of the following chapters which appear in a real work of modern literary criticism: ‘Noddy: Discursive Threads and Intertextuality’; ‘Sexism or Subversion: Querying Gender relations in The Famous Five and Malory Towers’. I was pulled up by one regular competitor (obviously not
In Competition No. 2582 you were invited to submit proverbs for the 21st century. Reading the entry brought to mind the magnificently mangled proverbs of Patrick O’Brian’s Captain Jack Aubrey (‘There’s a great deal to be said for making hay while the iron is hot’; ‘A bird in the hand waits for no man’). Your
In Competition No. 2581 you were invited to take a passage from a classic of French literature and recast it in Franglais. The challenge was inspired by Miles Kington’s masterly The Franglais Lieutenant’s Woman and Other Literary Masterpieces, and the standard was top-tiroir. You inflicted mongrel French and English on the literary classics to great
In Competition No. 2580 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘New Year Letter’, concluding with the words ‘under the familiar weight of winter, conscience and the state’. This couplet opens Auden’s long and oft-maligned verse epistle ‘New Year Letter’. Writing in the New Statesman in 1941, G.S. Fraser complained that he’d read
In Competition No. 2579 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of or denouncing the world wide web. In his book The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen, thorn in the side of Web 2.0, rails against the calamitous effects of user-generated web content on our culture, bemoaning the emergence of ‘digital narcissism’
In Competition No. 2578 you were invited to imagine the speech that Shakespeare, as a boy, might have delivered as he was slaughtering a calf. This challenge was inspired by John Aubrey’s portrait of the young bard in Brief Lives: ‘His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the
In Competition No. 2577 you were invited to supply definitions of five types of anything you chose. As the eagle-eyed among you will have spotted, Jaspistos set an almost identical assignment a few years ago, inspired by Sydney Smith’s six types of handshake. On that occasion, Noel Petty scooped the bonus fiver for his definition
In Competition No. 2576 you were invited to submit New Year’s resolutions of well-known figures past and present. There can be no finer example to the goal-setting constituency than Jaspistos who, in his late forties though not necessarily at New Year, resolved to do three things which he had regarded with particular dread: to attend
In Competition No. 2575 you were invited to submit a carol entitled ‘The Last Noel’. Noel for me generally goes like this: I make a brief, half-hearted stand against the evils of what now passes for Christmas and then succumb, with abandon, to avarice, gluttony and sloth. By the time I’d finished reading the entry,
In Competition No. 2574 you were invited to take a poem, or a fragment of a poem, and anagrammatise it to make a new poem. Some of you were unsure exactly what it was I was after. I was asking you to break down a poem, or part of it, into its constituent letters and
Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2573 you were invited to submit the synopsis of a sequel-that-was-never-written to a well-known novel. Sequels to books and films have a poor reputation, the assumption being that, with the odd exception (The Godfather: Part II, for example), they will almost certainly fall short of the
Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2572 you were invited to provide a rugby- or football-style song for another sport. After I’d set the assignment, it occurred to me that it runs counter to the spirit of football chants and rugby songs, which seem to arise spontaneously on the terraces and in
In Competition No. 2571 you were invited to submit an extract from the life story of a famous figure from history written in the style of a contemporary misery memoir. The seemingly insatiable appetite for tales of other people’s torment and degradation that keeps ‘mis lit’ at the top of the bestseller lists is as
In Competition No. 2570 you were invited to take any song by the Beatles or by Elvis Presley and rewrite it in the style of the poet of your choice. It’s a long way from Scotty Moore to Middle Scots but that didn’t stop Penelope Mackie, who submitted a fine rendition of ‘All Shook Up’
In Competition No. 2569 you were invited to describe a modern social ill of your choice in the style of Charles Dickens. Ills singled out included bellowing down mobile phones in public, elusive plumbers, and that scourge of the modern age, the potato wedge. Many entries ably demonstrate what George Orwell describes as Dickens’s ‘undisguised
In Competition No. 2568 you were invited to submit, in verse or prose, a profile of the typical Spectator competitor. The picture that emerges is not all together flattering: a monomaniacal oddbod, almost certainly male (even if he uses a female name) and no longer in the first flush of youth, who nurses a simmering