Boy did I need this today. The annual Bulwer-Lytton prize for bad writing has been awarded. It’s one of my favorite times of the year (I also love the “bad sex writing” award – another fave). People are invited to submit opening lines to imaginary bad books (in honor of Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton – a longtime favorite of Lucy Maud Montgomery, who once was famous and beloved, and now is mainly known for his purple prose and perhaps the most famous opening line in history: “It was a dark and stormy night”.)
This year’s winner (David McKenzie) goes off the damn deep end with so many truncated “ing’s” that you want to punch someone in the throat. It’s killing me, the ridiculousness of it, and the beauty of the insane mind who would think it up. Bravo.
“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”
You can read the list of winners here (they have a ton of different categories).
For example, here’s the winner for “Historical Fiction”:
The Cunard “Carinthia” glided through the starry waters of the Bering Sea, 843 passengers aboard, including Harriet Dobbs, resignedly single for over a decade, while a nautical mile due west slunk the K-18 submarine, under the command of lonely Ukrainian Captain First Rank Nikolai Shevchenko: ships that passed in the night (although the second technically a boat).
Others I love:
“I want you to follow my husband,” said my newest client, the enigmatic Mrs Yogi, estranged wife of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
I don’t know why that is so funny but it is.
Or this:
There were earthquakes in this land, terrible tsunamis that swirled flooding torrents of water throughout, and constant near-blizzard conditions, and not for the first time, Horatio Jones wished he did not live inside a snow globe.
And then this:
Lady Rowena, fresh from her bath, knew she had time to be ready to meet the Prince at 6:00 o’clock even though the mantle clock was striking six, because the brass escapement lever mechanism that engages the teeth of the large gear which drives the smaller gears that send the hour and minute hands on their circular paths, was worn.
And here is one that made me laugh out loud. A true gift on this mainly rotten day.
Category? Western.
He was the desert nightmare whose name no one dared breathe, this deadly gun-slinger Garth Tedder, whose face struck terror in the hearts of man and beast, its macabre, round, maroon cheeks almost exactly like the pickled beets that farmers’ wives force-fed their horrified families.
I have read that 10 times and I love it more each time.
I am at work, and people are asking me, “What’s so funny?” because I am just howling at my desk. I have always loved reading these. Update–Strange, but most people around me aren’t nearly as amused by these as I am. Obviously, it’s their fault/problem.
Arent they so much fun??
What are your favorites, tell me tell me.
Frankly, that’s like asking me my favorite “position.” I like them all.
“She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida the pink ones, not the white ones except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t.”
hahahahaha
I hadn’t read that one yet. Absolutely hilarious.
The image of all of these people across the country coming up with this malarkey is truly awesome to me.
“The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor–the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn’t use more than twice, but you do;”
“Fleur looked down her nose at Guilliame, something she was accomplished at, being six foot three in her stocking feet, and having one of those long French noses, not pert like Bridget Bardot’s, but more like the one that Charles De Gaulle had when he was still alive and President of France and he wore that cap that was shaped like a little hatbox with a bill in the front to offset his nose, but it didn’t work.”
“After quickly scrutinizing the two dangerously buff men coming toward her in the dark and wondering whether she could take them both out, P.I. Velma Plusch mentally inventoried her arsenal-two pistols, two stiletto-clad feet, two leather-gloved hands, two each eyes, ears, lips, and breasts-and decided that she could.”
Oh god, I am HOWLING at these.
these are hilarious!
Me too!!!
I entered the bedroom again, looking for anything the killer might have missed in his obvious attempt to clean the crime scene, when it hit me, the victim hadn’t been eating just any potato salad, it was German potato salad, the kind usually served warm, with bacon and although most people prefer the traditional American potato salad, it was clear that this victim didn’t, oh no, he didn’t prefer it at all.
LOL LOL
Each one just – improbably – gets better than the last!!!
I love how so many of them take a sort of Dashiell Hammett-esque tone, like it’s some warped Sam Spade babbling on – and the sentences just never end!!!
Warily-as if his hands were a green-bean casserole in a non-tempered glass dish that had just come out of the freezer, and the patient was an oven that had been preheating for a good 75 minutes at 450F
!!!
And then —
the surgeon
!!!
The surgeon has frozen green bean casserole hands!!!
Of course!
the surgeon slowly reached into the incision and groped for the bullet fragment in the pancreas, at last finding it nestled near one of the Islets of Langerhans like a small wrecked lifeboat foundered on a sandbar as it floated in the fog, adrift in the Sea of John’s Innards.
HOW COULD THAT HAVE BEEN A RUNNER UP?!?!?!
A non-tempered glass dish! Someone has been paying attention to their creative writing professors who stress that details tell the story…..
HAHAHAHAHA
Right – and the extraneous details just TAKE OVER!!!
You don’t know how much I am resisting the temptation to deconstruct these sentences on your blog, such is the raised eyebrowness of the absurdity I am reading, which as you can see is infecting me already like a wayward earthworm used as a leech after a long rainy night.
HAHAHAHA
Seriously – keep deconstructing them – I’ve been reading them all day and guffawing. They’re all so good! I love these people!
The first time I saw her she took my breath away with her long blonde hair that flowed over her shoulders like cheese sauce on a bed of nachos, making my stomach grumble as she stepped into the room, her red knit dress locking in curves better than a Ferrari at a Grand Prix.
DID NOT KNOW THAT BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD WROTE STORIES
I loved that one!!! The descriptive terms used are SO VILE but the “writer” is saying all of it as though she is the most beautiful thing in the world. Hysterical!
That one is just so, dude like. I can totally picture the dude who hangs at the 7-11 thinking exactly that about some chick he likes, and meaning it in the best possible way.
Like, of course his stomach would grumble at the sight of her nacho cheese hair.
Right – it’s a TOTAL compliment!
He’s totally taking her to NASCAR for their first date too
I’m totally going to compliment somebody tomorrow on their lucious nacho cheese hair.
“Using her flint knife to gut the two amphibians, Kreega the Neanderthal woman created the first pair of open-toad sandals.”
I’m not even really laughing at the dreadful pun (although I am, a little), but the IMAGE of this woman. And the fact she’s called Kreega.
I think my favourite is:
“Rosalita came in looking, with a look of surprise not unlike that of Hedy Lamarr in the 1947 version of “Samson and Delilah” when she learns that Samson will marry the woman, portrayed by Angela Lansbury, but with less fervor than that of Joan Crawford’s 1948 version of “Mildred Pierce” discovering her daughter, played by Ann Blythe, was to run away with her, (Mildred’s) boyfriend, to discover that Ernesto had once again left up the toilet seat.”
I can spend an eternity roaming on this site. I have no idea, how I arrived here- and that seems to make sense.
‘But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.’
My question is, how on earth do they pick a winner? They’re all so fabulously awful.
Shit, I missed the party – so damned funny!!
I loved them all, but my favorite had to be the fantasy winner:
A quest is not to be undertaken lightly–or at all!–pondered Hlothgar, Thrag of the Western Boglands, son of Glothar, nephew of Garthol, known far and wide as Skull Dunker, as he wielded his chesty stallion Hralgoth through the ever-darkening Thlargwood, beyond which, if he survived its horrors and if Hroglath the royal spittle reader spoke true, his destiny awaited–all this though his years numbered but fourteen.
The first one sounds exactly like he came from Lovecraft’s Innsmouth.
What are you talking about, Ken? There’s not an “amorphous” or “defies description: in that entire paragraph. :)
“defies description“ rather.
Heh, Cullen. I was thinking of the old drunk in Innsmouth. (And stop looking at my neck ridges.)
“I’m drunk. No, let me revise that. I am a drunk. But I seem to get along just fine.” Just wanted to publicly submit that so I wouldn’t be tempted to actually use it as a first set of cryptic sentences for a new story.