The scary thing isn't that Scott Rice runs a contest for the best example of bad writing, but that 10,000 people around the world tried last year to win first prize.
Since 1982 people who enjoy slaughtering the language have been entering the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, named after English writer Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, who in his time was second in popularity only to another great Victorian, Charles Dickens.Aspiring Bulwer-Lyttons from Indonesia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, France, West Germany, Britain, the United States and elsewhere send the best of their introductory sentences to Rice, a professor of English at San Jose State University.
The entries must be in the spirit of Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel "Paul Clifford" begins with this turgid paragraph:
"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
Bulwer-Lytton also penned the phrase "The pen is mightier than the sword."
Rice has published three volumes of past entries in his contest and titled them: "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night," "Son of It Was a Dark and Stormy Night," and "Bride of Dark and Stormy."
"I think people are attracted to the idea of being deliberately bad at something," said Rice, interviewed in a tiny office he shares with dictionaries, stylebooks and works by Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Johnson, D.H. Johnson and, of course, Bulwer-Lytton.
"Most people understand that it's a put-on, but at the same time they realize it's a chance to make a statement about literacy," he said. "When you give serious thought to what makes something bad, you're thinking in indirect ways about what makes things good."
Linda Vernon, a Californian who won a word processor as this year's overall winner, entered the contest as part of her work for a writing class. Her entry:
"Dolores breezed along the surface of her life like a flat stone forever skipping along smooth water, rippling reality sporadically but oblivious to it consistently, until she finally lost momentum, sank and, due to an overdose of fluoride as a child which caused her to suffer from chronic apathy, doomed herself to lie forever on the floor of her life as useless as an appendix and as lonely as a five hundred-pound barbell in a steroid-free fitness center."
"It's really fun, once you get hooked on it," said Vernon. "I have a friend whose hobby is to write Bulwer-Lytton entries. It's great, because you never have to finish anything."
Awards are also given in such categories as horror, science fiction, adventure, western and detective.
Dennis Doolin of Tokyo, judged best at writing vile puns, wrote:
"Half-crazed by ravenous hunger and the primordial desire to survive, Rhett Butler seized the scrawny chicken leg, deaf to her entreaties to share the only food left in Atlanta, and snarled, `Frankly, Scarlett, I don't give a gam!' "
"We have thousands of people all over the world polishing their sentences and looking carefully at their reading for inspirations," said Rice.
Bad writing demonstrates that good writing is more a matter of constructing good sentences than using big words, said Rice, a point amply demonstrated by Bulwer-Lytton.
"He refers to a bedroom as a somnabular accommodation," Rice said. A pipe becomes a Promethean tube, and a beer a nectarian beverage. "That kind of variation is bad writing."
The muse of bad writing that inspired Bulwer-Lytton appears to be thriving.