Computer Analyst Wins Best Worst Writing Contest

pmadden writes "Dan McKay, a friend from years ago, has won a prestigious literary award. I've enjoyed technical manuals over the years, but never like this. Who would have guessed that such great writing would come from the grad of a small technical school."

Comments

I NEVER THOUGHT

[cathouse]

that anyone tried to write the way I was always criticized mfor.

Re:I NEVER THOUGHT

[SuperWebTech]

You'll enjoy this excerpt from the 1994 winner's entry (CNET):

As the fading light of a dying day filtered through the window blinds, Roger stood over his victim with a smoking .45, surprised at the serenity that filled him after pumping six slugs into the bloodless tyrant that mocked him day after day, and then he shuffled out of the office with one last look back at the shattered computer terminal lying there like a silicon armadillo left to rot on the information superhighway.

Speaking to my wife

[Rhoon]

His entry, extolling a subject that has engaged poets for millennia, may have been inspired by Roxie Hart of the musical "Chicago." Complaining of her husband's ineptitude in the boudoir, Roxie laments, "Amos was . . . zero. I mean, he made love to me like he was fixing a carburetor or something."

Nahh, he's just been speaking to my wife.

Dear Dan McKay

[Fastball]

I am a literary agent. I recently read your novella, "Ample Bosom," and I think it is a smash! Your talent for the mammary gland-carburetor metaphor leaps off of the page! I want to represent you. Please call the number below at your earliest convenience...

Dark and Stormy...

[UCFFool]

From TFA:

The competition highlights literary achievements of the most dubious sort -- terrifyingly bad sentences that take their inspiration from minor writer Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel "Paul Clifford" began, "It was a dark and stormy night."

Ok, I get the redundancy of 'dark' and 'night', but I don't find this as horrific as comparing anatomy to car parts *Though Jay Leno may disagree*

Re:Dark and Stormy...

[swilde23]

I was a little confused as well. Being in the Engineering department, I don't venture over to the English side of things. However, wikipedia seems to clear things up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bulwer-Lytton, _1st_Baron_Lytton

His name lives on in the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which contestants have to supply the openings of terrible (imaginary) novels, inspired by his novel Paul Clifford, which opens with the famous words:

"It was a dark and stormy night"

or to give the sentence in its full glory:

"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."

The shorter form of the opening sentence was popularized by the Peanuts comic strip. Snoopy's sessions with the typewriter usually began with it. Entrants in the contest seek to capture the rapid changes in point of view, the florid language, and the atmosphere of the full sentence.

Re:Dark and Stormy...

[hawkeye_82]

Stolen directly from the fortune databases:

Whenever Snoopy starts typing his novel from the top of his doghouse, beginning "It was a dark and stormy night..." he is borrowing from Lord Bulwer-Lytton. This was the line that opened his novel, "Paul Clifford," written in 1830. The full line reveals why it is so bad:

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.

Re:Dark and Stormy...

[lukewarmfusion]

Having served on the editing staff of my high school literary magazine for three years, I remember reading a good number of terribly cliched opening lines. We had several entries each year that started "It was a dark and stormy night" and ended with their own horrible writing. Once or twice the ending was a simple period, as in "It was a dark and stormy night." We discovered that many young writers believed that this line was the official start of a short story or novel.

As a 16-year-old poet, I forced myself away from my natural tendencies to rhyme such breakthrough combinations as heart/apart, love/above, and crying/dying. Once I got into Eliot and Cummings, I mostly forgot about rhyming altogether. Can't say the same for most submissions we had...

Re:Dark and Stormy...

[iggymanz]

Cummings? you mean cummings.

Oh, he's talented

[WickedClean]

I'm sure Hollywood is calling right now. I wonder if this is where the studios recruit some of their screenwriters.

Thats

[JustOK]

Computer person badly writes? Unpossible.

Hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

And he works for Microsoft! Hello? Where've the MS bashers gone off to tonight?

Oh, and if you scroll down the page with the other entries, you get this in the Sci-Fi category:
Long, long ago in a galaxy far away, in General Hospital born I was, and quite happy were my parents, but when a youngling still I was, moved we did.

D

Re:Hmmm...

[Pollardito]

this was my favorite :

They ask me if it was dark that night the hyenas showed up and ate the little beagle as he sat typing away on his dog house and then ate all the little round-faced kids, and I tell 'em, "no," it was not even stormy, kind of a calm, half-moon lit night where you'd sit on your deck having some peanuts, until the hyenas arrived of course and then it got so noisy you had to go in the house.

Bill Crowley
Santa Rosa, CA

Re:Hmmm...

[jayloden]

And he works for Microsoft! Hello? Where've the MS bashers gone off to tonight?

Here: "Now we know who writes all those cryptic error messages and the dialoge for clippy!" ;)

Exhaust

[confusion]

Wonder what he would have to say about the exhaust manifold?

jerry
http://www.cyvin.org/

Can it be 'worst' if intentionally so?

[guynorton]

The competition's title should be changed to 'Best parody of bad literature'.

Most of the entries I have read are funny, and intentionally so because they are parodying bad writing. Unless their parody fails in the most abysmal way I dont see how it qualifies as bad prose. For writing to qualify as bad, terrible or 'worst' it should be unwittingly so.

Disappointing

[kongjie]

As an English major from way back, I have been aware of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for some time but never looked into the complete results.

My first reaction after seeing the 2005 results pages is that if the people who run this thing want to keep it going, they might invest a little more design thought into their work. Yes, even though they only do it out of love and don't get a nickel for it.

My second feeling is, despite the burden of reading a lot more bad prose, they should go back to a paragraph rather than a sentence. Many of the entries of note were more silly than really horrible and I think requiring the writer to write a coherent paragraph would produce better (erm, I mean worse) results.

By the way, if you want more info on the history of the contest, go to the the Bulwer-Lytton home page .

Uber geek?

[Jugalator]

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

As he read this brilliant description, in bright red letters against a background as white as the purest of snow, to make his eyes ache slightly from the strain, a creeping thought slowly approached him much like a stalker of Natalie Portman, and as the thought materialized in his head, it told him -- "wow, he thinks exactly like a Slashdotter".

Re:Uber geek?

[rinkjustice]

As he read this brilliant description, in bright red letters against a background as white as the purest of snow, to make his eyes ache slightly from the strain, a creeping thought slowly approached him much like a stalker of Natalie Portman, and as the thought materialized in his head, it told him -- "wow, he thinks exactly like a Slashdotter".

He leaned back in his chair and listened to the wood groan under his shifting spine. The words on the computer screen stared at him menacingly. Could it really be the undead, unholy scrit of Stephen King, under the nickname Jugalator? King had been been reported dead at the age of 55, and Jason remembered how the Slashdot news story hit him like a beowolf cluster of right and left hooks to the midsection. And now he felt punch-drunk again. He pushed away from the basking electromagnetic glow of the computer monitor and stumbled into the kitchen. He needed to clear his mind, jarr his sences into reality (he didn't have a girlfriend to do that for him). In desperation, he poured a bowl of hot grits down his denim pants and howled in pain, but the oppressive thoughts of SCO and Natilie Portman had bore their claws deep into his consciousness. Was he doomed to writhe in insanity like an old person in Korea who used email instead of Instant Messenging?

Bulwer-Lytton

[adam1101]

Ah, yes, the Bulwer-Lytton contest. The challenge is to write the worst novel opening line you can think of. As most entries tend to be rather long, there is also a Lyttle Lytton contest limited to 25 word, with classics as

In 3010, the potatoes triumphed.

and the latest winner

John, surfing, said to his mother, surfing beside him, "How do you like surfing?"

Re:Bulwer-Lytton

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFS, I really like this one:

"The night resembled nothing so much as the nose of a giant Labrador in excellent health: cold, black, and wet."

I mean, this is huge.

Re:And speaking of bad writing ...

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Headers are an appropriate follow-on to carburetors...

Bulwer-Lytton, quoted without attribution

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

"The pen is mightier than the sword" is also a Bulwer-Lytton quote. It's funny that people quote him as an example of wisdom while attaching his name to bad writing contests.

What's even funnier is that it's so out of context as to be nearly a misquote. He wrote "Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword". I've never seen a better description of good government.

I take issue with the premise of this contest.

[eataTREE]

I never think that very many of the entries really count as bad writing. Consider this year's entry: it's funny as hell! It's entertaining, which bad writing never is. Bad writing is, well, bad: boring, tedious, incoherent. Judging a truly bad writing contest would be a monumental chore. I think the B-L contest is really a "silly writing contest".

Re:I take issue with the premise of this contest.

[gowen]

Bad writing is, well, bad: boring, tedious, incoherent.

Yeah, but we can't have Ayn Rand winning every year.

Strange Thing About Writing

[Rob Carr]

Of all the engineers and scientists and doctors that I know, all find their writing skills to be far more important than their math skills. They all wind up writing documents to get funds and report findings; most barely use calculus in their jobs and only one uses numerical methods for solving partial differential equations -- and he only uses that in his high power rocketry hobby.

A computer programmer I know wishes he'd skipped his Fortran and Cobol classes for a technical writing class, but that might be damning by faint praise.

Does he mean Strombergs, or SUs?

[panurge]

Sticking to the stuff that matters, I thought it was the SU (Skinner Union) carburetor that was found on so many British cars of that era. The SU had a remarkably boob-shaped chamber on top which was indeed capped with a nipple-like object which held the damper rod. There was a chamber inside which contained oil and was connected to a piston which went up and down according to the inlet manifold depression. I am sure the SU was one of the reasons that the VW beetle was so much more successful than small British cars of the same period. (The other reasons were the appalling quality, the underpowered engines, the high cost of spares, the rust, the inaccessibility of mechanical parts, and the whole bad karma of the entire British car industry with the exception of Morgan, which actually made a virtue out of being quirky and English.)

Accordingly I have to point out that what makes this such bad writing is that in reality anybody faced with tuning a pair of SUs would naturally find his thoughts turning to the more attractive subject of boobs, and not vice versa.

Re:Does he mean Strombergs, or SUs?

[hayfever]

No, his Triumph Spitfire would have had Zenith-Stromberg carbs. In the early to mid 60's (before the formation of British Leyland) there were 2 primary auto manufactures in the UK, British Motor Corp (BMC) and Standard-Triumph. As I've heard it told BMC owned SU who made the carbs and decided to stop selling them to Standard-Triumph, who quickly came up with a design that wouldn't violate the SU patents by using a diaphragm to control piston motion and convinced Zenith/Solex to manufacture it as the Zenith-Stromberg (Stromberg was the Standard-Triumph person behind the design). In the late 60's/early 70's British Leyland was formed by the merger of BMC & Standard-Triumph but Triumphs (like his Triumph Spitfire) kept using Zenith-Stromberg carburettors. Incidently the Z-S 175CD (most common) and SU HS6 (most common) are directly interchangeable as are other models I believe.

Re:Does he mean Strombergs, or SUs?

[seanadams.com]

Here's a pic of the SU carbs:

http://www.vord.net/cars/mgb_mods/engine/weber500- carburetor.htm

I want to represent you

[rk]

in a transfer of overinvoiced funds from the Lagos Oil Trust Bank in Nigeria. Your discretion is appreciated.

(Pretend the last paragraph was in all caps.)

Vogon bait

[GrAfFiT]

I'm sure that this is a conspiracy to get the Vogons to destroy Earth by challeging them on writing skills.

Winner?

[mendaliv]

It's amazing that the winner wasn't "Anonymous Coward". That guy is amazing for writing particularly bad stuff!

that's it

[lubricated]

We need a contest on the best worst use of mathematics and/or statistics. That way we can poke fun back at those snotty English majors. The problem is that the contest is probably oversaturated.

Re:Dark night redundant?

[fbjon]

Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?