Post by The City Manager on Sept 5, 2006 15:00:55 GMT -5
If you're not already familiar with it, there's something called The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, loosely referred to as, "The Bad Writing Contest." Sponsored by the English Department of San José State University in San Jose, California, it's based on a passage written in 1830 that begins with familiar the phrase, "It was a dark and stormy night," and digresses into a lengthy, convoluted opening sentence that suffers because of it's over-use of adjectives, disjointed metaphors, and so forth. It's all done tongue-in-cheek, and it demonstrates how anyone can produce a bit of bad writing, even without trying very hard. Anyone (even you) can enter.
As I've dabbled in professional writing, most of it having been of the "bad" variety, the contest, and it's results, are naturally of perpetual interest to me. You can read examples of the winning entries at the site by clicking the logo above, however, here are just a few that made me laugh out loud.
While Hector and the heroes of Troy trembled behind the ramparts as cowboys below the walls raced up and down the beach, six-guns blazing and cries of "yee-hah!" filling the air, other cowboys across the sea were laboring gamely but in vain to throw a palisade around Wichita, Kansas, thereby adding veracity to the old homily of history that it is easier to cow a fortified city than to fortify a cow city.
When Debbie decided that Salt 'n' Pepper Beard was the most attractive pirate on the ship, she realized that choosing him was due to the advice of Sylvia, her new Life Coach, to be realistic about her own age and to open herself up to romance where it lay, unlike the troublesome past where she would have wished that only the younger pirates take advantage of her.
The king's men breathed heavily under their thick black hoods as they secured the wrists and ankles of prisoner William Tumey of Kent and as the rack's handle began to turn the ropes tightened and William's limbs were slowly stretched in opposite directions until his spine began to pop much like a bag of Redenbachers in a microwave and for something like the time it takes a hummingbird's wings to complete one cycle William smiled and euphorically languished in perfect lumbar alignment.
