7.12.2006

It Was a Dark and Stormy Contest

but the winners have now seen the light of day.
Posted by at

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hilarious. It is good to see fun made of our wonderfully difficult and spectacularly silly language. -JTC

7/12/2006
Mazement said...

The Lyttle Lytton contest results are up too.

(It's a rival contest with a 25-words-or-less rule.)

7/12/2006
Stephen Gallagher said...

Is it just me, or do these get lamer every year? My recall is that the earliest examples circulated were of genuinely bad, sincerely-written prose that achieved heroic awfulness. Now it's just people trying to be funny with the same basic formulae.

7/12/2006
Anonymous said...

I think if I use the opening line from any one of my stories I should be able to win the Lyttle Lytton contest hands down. -JTC

7/12/2006
Xopher said...

I agree with Mr. Gallegher. These just aren't all that funny these days. And some of them could actually begin a good novel. Example: if "[']Twas brillig, and the toves were not just slithy, they were stinking drunk" were followed by "Or at any rate, I was, and I couldn't remember that stupid poem even sober," that could begin a fairly comic episode in the life of, say, a gin-swilling agent...OR SOMETHING!!! NOT NECESSARILY AN AGENT!!!

vahxgiko, n. a you-don't-want-to-know-what's-in-it dish from rural Ukraine.

7/12/2006
Stacy said...

I've been following this contest for several years, and while these winners may not be quite up to the quality of badness that is usually displayed, I find them sufficiently bad.
And the idea of people submitting their own sincerely written prose to a bad writing contest blows my mind.

For people who prefer to read previously published bad prose,
www.bulwer-lytton.com sends you to
http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/sticks.htm

7/12/2006
Chumplet said...

Waddaya win? Waddaya win? Not an agent, for sure. That was priceless!

7/12/2006
Anonymous said...

Some favorites, from Bill Pronzini’s Gun in Cheek.

The next day dawned bright and clear on my empty stomach.

My stunned intellect, the one that found death in his own backyard with him standing only feet away, hard to swallow in a hurry, found the answer.

Dolores came around the bed with the speed of a big ape. . .She descended on me like a tree full of the same apes she looked like.

“I’ve done a stupid thing, Ed,” Opal Trace musicaled.

And my all-time favorite:

“Opal. . .” she hoarsed.

From the published writings of Michael Avallone:

7/13/2006
Blog-o-licious said...

Those are funny, like something that is really funny!

7/13/2006

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