For four decades, an English professor at San Jose State University has run a fiction contest for a single opening sentence to "the worst of all possible novels." He has decided to retire the contest.

National Novel Writing Month—usually shortened to NaNoWriMo—is an annual creative writing event in which participants set out to write a 50,000-word draft of a novel in the month of November. More ...

Although she hated the acrid taste and bite of the cigarette she had just lighted, the woman with tousled gray hair, narrowed eyes and a sneer of a mouth sauntered over to the tired-looking man at the ...

A modest but effective example of the sort of thing Eliot had in mind is the annual Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature. Previous winners have included the ...