You have EXACTLY 3 MONTHS to be the worst you can be!

[Boyo_Jim]

April 15 is the deadline for the 2008 Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest, which I was fortunate enough to win in 2007. I intend to win again! Except no one’s ever won twice, and if somebody’s gonna beat me I hope it will be a fellow Doper.

No entry fee, no limit on the number of entries, email entries accepted… only the slackest of slackers could pass this up. Rules at the link above.

I will be happy to provide advice to further degrade your sentence if you wish.
I am setting the bar here by posting my entries to date for this year. I begin with a sequel to last year’s winner, as the contest judge commented that no sequel was even possible:

**As Gerald began to dig out, he pondered the reasons for his continued existence – the excessive modesty and weak bladder which had led him deep into the bowels of a cave to relieve himself moments before a massive volcanic eruption had devastated the landscape for miles around – and wished he had never heard that the interior of a cave was known as its bowels as he had begun to worry that going into bowels might mean he was gay; and had he expressed this concern aloud it would have been clear to anyone listening that whatever reasons there might be for his survival, quick wits were not among them.

Like a demented Roomba repeatedly bumping against the same couch leg and plaintively sucking until the batteries ran down, Britney gyrated against the microphone stand.

If you thought Bambi had a tough childhood, you haven’t heard the story about Snowball the baby seal and the man with the three pound ball peen hammer.

Seeing death off the starboard bow in the form of a rogue wave sweeping in, Marco the navigator began to calculate where his grave marker should be placed – a little to port and aft and about 5,000 feet down from his present position, which was… well, when he thought about navigational margins of error and continental drift and planetary rotation, and the orbit of the earth around the sun and the sun around the Milky Way, and galaxy’s trajectory outward from the original Big Bang, he finally appreciated the futility of his career choice – as a professional navigator and amateur cosmologist, Marco was the best equipped crewman on the ship to understand that he had no friggin’ clue exactly where he was: where he would be in another 30 seconds might just as well be called “up the creek” or “down the tubes” with as much accuracy as GPS coordinates.

When I suggested that Mary Jo’s demeanor was sometimes less than lady-like, she screamed, “I’m gonna gut you, you sumbitch!” and attacked me with a steak knife until distracted by the sound of the audience shouting “WHEEL…OF…FORTUNE!” on the living room TV.

Deedee doesn’t do diddley during daylight; during dusk, Deedee duly, dully doodles deer dropping drawings.**

[Yllaria]

There’s a thread here on limiting the use of adverbs and stage description of voice tone in dialog. I think I might try to find new ways to overdo that.

Thanks for posting the notice. And I hope that you truly suck this year.

[Xema]

@Boyo Jim

Seeing death off the starboard bow in the form of a rogue wave sweeping in, Marco the navigator began to calculate where his grave marker should be placed – a little to port and aft and about 5,000 feet down from his present position, which was… well, when he thought about navigational margins of error and continental drift and planetary rotation, and the orbit of the earth around the sun and the sun around the Milky Way, and galaxy’s trajectory outward from the original Big Bang, he finally appreciated the futility of his career choice – as a professional navigator and amateur cosmologist, Marco was the best equipped crewman on the ship to understand that he had no friggin’ clue exactly where he was: where he would be in another 30 seconds might just as well be called “up the creek” or “down the tubes” with as much accuracy as GPS coordinates.

This may not win, but it completely croaks anything I could produce.

[The_Controvert]

@Boyo Jim

When I suggested that Mary Jo’s demeanor was sometimes less than lady-like, she screamed, “I’m gonna gut you, you sumbitch!” and attacked me with a steak knife until distracted by the sound of the audience shouting “WHEEL…OF…FORTUNE!” on the living room TV. **

Just wanted to say this line was hee larious!

[Baldwin]

I’ll enter the contest. But here’s something I don’t understand: why is the following passage held up as an example of bad writing?

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."

–Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford(1830)

It’s a bit long, though not unusually so for a sentence in an early 19th century novel. But it’s not ridiculously wordy. The adjectives and adverbs all serve to produce a vivid scene in the mind’s eye. Exactly what is suppoed to be wrong with the sentence?

[Snarky_Kong]

@Baldwin

I’ll enter the contest. But here’s something I don’t understand: why is the following passage held up as an example of bad writing?

It’s a bit long, though not unusually so for a sentence in an early 19th century novel. But it’s not ridiculously wordy. The adjectives and adverbs all serve to produce a vivid scene in the mind’s eye. Exactly what is suppoed to be wrong with the sentence?

The parenthetical note makes that sentence like eighty billion times worse.

Could I just submit any sentence from that porn star’s blog from the Jenna Jameson thread?

[Mullinator]

The alarming ring of the telephone (alarming in the sense that he didn’t expect the ring (though, as a technical support analyst, it should not have come as a surprise) and not in the sense that it woke him from a sound slumber as if on some vibrant Spring morn when one would think most people would have better things to do than call technical support such as tending the garden, walking through a verdant meadow, or staring at the ever-changing clouds (assuming there is some sort of cloud cover, after all, it was a vibrant Spring morn)) stirred David from his contemplative state and into a Pavlovian response mode of grudging aid driven more by a defined series of structured steps in a dusty manual and less by an altruistic sense of human kindness until he realized the ringing phone was in the next cube over.

[Oredigger77]

Jimmy screamed, as the lawnmower began to eat the frog sucking him up into the swirly toothy abyss, not only is the tallest blade of grass cut but also the fattest frog, “You can’t be out of ice cream.”

[Cluricaun]

I see we can email, but to what address?

[Boyo_Jim]

@Cluricaun

I see we can email, but to what address?

Go here. Click on the icon OR the name Scott Rice at the bottom of the page. The address isn’t spelled out as a defense against bots.

[Boyo_Jim]

@Snarky_Kong

…Could I just submit any sentence from that porn star’s blog from the Jenna Jameson thread?

Has to be previously unpublished. I entered my sentences in the contest before “publishing” them here.

[Boyo_Jim]

@Baldwin

I’ll enter the contest. But here’s something I don’t understand: why is the following passage held up as an example of bad writing?

It’s a bit long, though not unusually so for a sentence in an early 19th century novel. But it’s not ridiculously wordy. The adjectives and adverbs all serve to produce a vivid scene in the mind’s eye. Exactly what is suppoed to be wrong with the sentence?

You’re right that it’s not expecially bad, or even abnormal, for 19th century writing. In fact, this web quiz gives you a series of sentences and asks whether they were written by Bulwer-Lytton or Charles Dickens, and it is tough to tell.

The best answer I can give you is that this is the 21st century, not the 19th, and standards have changed. The contest is about parodying (is that a word?) the old style when everything including the kitchen sink was thrown in.

[Shirley_Ujest]

a demented Roomba

Awesome visual.

[Dusty]

As I am sometimes wont to do when the occasion should arise to allow it, and in acknowledgment and indeed celebration of the stylistic proclivities of those warriors who fought valiantly as she who lost Hanover while gaining Empire reigned–not with the sword, but with the pen, and not on the bloodied field, but upon the creamy, smooth, and silken surface of the paper’s canon–and, more than all, he whose phrases exemplify and indeed surely command this army, for they in the unwashed’s sundry minds still turn in unalloyed contrast to the forgotten multitudes of those of lesser rank, the occasion has indeed arisen and thus, in the light of Victoria’s own majestic purples, I shall proceed.

In this, the first outing on which I embark, I have upon the literary canvas painted with few and simple strokes a pleasant scene, but in embellishing a minor aspect of little significance, with but a single hair I draw in exquisite detail a metaphor of wholly different tone:

Without–on stones hard as must be those on which, in the Depth’s deepest deploring despair, tread the feet of those for whom, though not for want of wanting, the cooling effects of an Autumn’s cool rain does not belong, but rather only the heat of an inferno’s fiery flames that come in waves that pierce–stood our ever-cheerful hero.

Continuing, I now play upon a new instrument of strange and sinister tone, whence this foreboding scientific fiction’s jarring chords:

In this distance beat the hoofs of what surely were a thousand equines, unless by some perverted chance–and it is a perverted world in which our story begins–they be bipedal, and as such you may double the number, but as to the ear’s of the nameless man supine on the foreground’s unearthly soil, they were unmolested, for he seems entirely dead.

Like the promise of a thespian’s first appearance on stage do my words now excite with impending drama, but so quickly it seems the star must be ill, for only an understudy of direst preparation would be so frightful of mistake as to articulate not a single doubtless phrase:

Upon the table, the Professor sat his mysterious object, which had been acquired perhaps three months prior when, delayed by unforeseen rains while on safari in darkest Africa, he encountered a native tribe as yet undocumented by European explorers, though this was unknown to him when the gift (as he now describes it, though whether it was in truth may never be known) was given him.

My foray into the Baron’s realm, brief as if it had been thwarted by a high stone wall, now concludes, but my fearsome hordes have the mathematical advantage and so, in a last effort, send their sapper division to do battle by untried means while the remainder performs a distracting farce:

Five of the assembled competed bitterly for the prize, which Bernardo the Spaniard, who is the seventh–not in the line of Bernardos, but of those on the field–had betted against the earlier boasts of one through five, as well as a continuing number of others who are not now present (for the stakes are high), which is why Bernardo is now seven, leaving only six unexplained.

[Bryan_Ekers]

I threw them this:

The squirrel, perhaps sensing better nut territory across the road, skipped merrily along, its tail forming the steady undulating curve of a sine wave before being crushed into the perpetually increasing flatness of an asymptote function beneath the wheels of James Jummelford’s lorry, who failed to notice because his mind was still occupied with the uncomfortably interrupted romance of last night’s dinner with Mabel Vandin-Limner in Grovelshore-on-Freddle when he’d asked her to marry him but failed to get an answer before the waiter had collapsed over their table with the bill in his hand and an unknown assailant’s knife in his back.

[Bryan_Ekers]

Submitted:

“Not for nothing was he called Kid Zero.”

[Hostile_Dialect]

My entries so far:

It seems like men are always portrayed on TV as big children looking for a toy to play with–which is pretty accurate, really, at least in our hero’s case, except for those times when he has to save the world, which frankly annoys him a little; but our hero’s lovely young wife often wonders if even those occasions are merely an extension of his sense of boyish arrogance, and if maybe the TV people kind of have a point.

There was, like, nothing she could do; her car was gone, her friends were still shopping, and her enemies, who were pretty much the same group of people–well, I don’t have to tell you what they were doing–and she stared up into the sky to find nothing but clouds and apathy staring back at her; presently she wondered exactly how “like” came to mean nothing at all yet potentially occupy every position in a sentence, anyway, and whether it might turn people off in somewhere further away from the ocean like, you know, Kansas or something; but then, she had never been to Kansas and never would, especially considering the gigantic flaming meteor which now joined the clouds and the apathy in the sky and seemed to be headed straight for her gaping maw.

[elfkin477]

I’ve now sent mine along:

Leopold looked up at the arrow piercing the skin of the dirigible with a sort of wondrous dismay - the wheezy shriek was just the sort of sound he always imagined a baby moose being beaten with a pair of accordions might make.

[elfkin477]

Out of curiousity, did anyone else get a response sort of mocking them for only submitting one entry?

“Only one submission from a person with your powers of invention?”

[Hostile_Dialect]

I got the impression that he mocks everyone who submits anything. I got “Your submissions have arrived and will receive the treatment they deserve.”

Or maybe there’s a script that picks a semi-random flippant remark based on how many submissions were received?