Jennifer stood there, quietly ovulating.
Adam Cadre (creator of the Lyttle Lytton Contest)
Humph eyed the corpse, its face split in two in much the same way as the Brexit referendum had divided her native country in 2016.
Christopher Hoult
There Are Two Kinds Of Bad Writing: For Fun And For Real
Reading Bad Writing has become essential entertainment for me during the pandemic.
Bad Writing for Fun is the product of a creative mind in search of the perfect balance between feelings of wild enthusiasm, knowledge and rejection of the basics of writing, and a touch of insanity. Bad Writing can creatively use cliches and puns and may sometimes hark back to turns of phrase from past classics, with a quiet twist.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times – though any decent statistician might net those two factors together and conclude that things were fairly average all round.
David Meech
Bad Writing for Real is all of the above, possibly coupled with a desire to pen a best-seller.
Joe just looks at me with that stupid look, covered in flowing blood, going onto his shirt like ketchup randomness, so much messier and more random than I could ever plan.
Palo Alto: Stories (2010), by James Franco
Becoming A Fan Of Bad Writing During The Pandemic
I am a travel blogger. However, since I’m going nowhere during the pandemic I have been telling people that we can still travel in our minds. I’ve written a number of blogs about the memories of past travels, the power of nostalgia, and the benefits of daydreaming.
I’m getting to the end of the line with mind travel, though; it is getting pretty boring. And since I don’t write my blog for money (good thing, because it is no way to earn a living), I can write about whatever I like.
My current mental vacation is in discovering Bad Writing (with special kudos for Bad Travel Writing), and I ask you all to join me in my search—there’s just too much material out there for one person to digest.
As the sun dropped below the horizon, the safari guide confirmed the approaching cape buffaloes were herbivores, which calmed everyone in the group, except for Herb, of course.
Ron D. Smith
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (BLFC)/Lyttle Lytton Contest
After purchasing an oval Chinese frying pan at the diminutive British aristocrat’s yard sale, Nigel realized that he’d just taken a long wok off a short Peer.
Bart King
Since 1982 the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest has challenged man, woman, and (very precocious) child to write an atrocious opening sentence to a hypothetical bad novel. We’re honored to receive thousands of odious entries from around the world each year.
Bulwer-Lytton Contest website
The contest was created by Scott Rice, a professor at San Jose State University, who appreciates what he calls “outlandishly inappropriate” entries and send-ups of writers who try too hard to be original. Since bad writing exists in every genre, Rice offers awards in such categories as adventure, children’s literature, crime and detective, dark and stormy, fantasy and horror, historical fiction, purple prose, romance, science fiction, vile puns, westerns, and “miscellaneous dishonorable mentions.”
The contest was inspired when Scott came across the interminable first sentence that became the ground zero 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 Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford, 1830
Appropriately, one of the winners in the Romance category of the BLFC awards made a courageous stab at Bulwer-Lytton’s famous sentence:
He was a dark and stormy knight, and this excited Gwendolyn, but admittedly not as much as last night when he was Antonio Banderas in drag, or the night before that when he was a French Legionnaire who blindfolded her and fed her pommes frites from his kepi.
Leslie Muir
Lyttle Lytton Contest
The Lyttle Lytton Contest is the brainchild of Adam Cadre, who has been overseeing the site for 20 years, inspired by the BLFC.
Cadre believes that brevity is the soul of wit and requests that the entries to his contest not be longer than 33 words. He admits that many of the entries have in the past involved sex and political correctness (but I have only chosen one selection about a body part in the contribution immediately following, with a few others for your entertainment).
Monica had exploded, and I had a mystery, and pieces of her pancreas, on my hands.
Bruce Otter
He loved the sound of her name—Sandrine—as it reminded him of two of his favorite things in life: sandwiches and tambourines.
Kelley Farmer
Once upon a time, it was 1:30 p.m. on a Tuesday
Melyssa Gresham
“You’re in trouble, mi amigo,” said the alcalde, which means mayor in Spanish, to the criminal.
Sarah Rosenthal
Judging bad writing is pretty subjective. Some judges prefer purple prose, some are fans of similes and metaphors run wild. One genre rife with both purple prose and wild similes and metaphors is travel writing.
Bad Travel Writing
Anyone can be a bad travel writer. It’s as easy as using clichés, not quoting locals, and writing about your husband Larry as much as possible.
Bennett Gordon, The Utne Reader
Since I am a travel blogger I am outraged, OUTRAGED! that travel writing is not included in the Bulwer-Lytton contest. Bad travel writing has a long and glorious history.
According to David Farley in Worldhum, this is the way to write a bad travel blog or article:
- Mention your husband Larry immediately in the lede.
- Try not to have a point (Just describe and describe.)
- Use as many clichés as possible (Compare one country to another—as in “Croatia is the next Italy,” “Montenegro is the next Croatia,” or “Albania is the next Montenegro.”)
- Tell, don’t show (“The village was quaint and charming.”)
- Don’t concern yourself with exposition (Don’t bother with history or culture)
- Talk to as few locals as possible (“Curiosity killed the cat. Don’t let it kill you.”) My own note: popular books like “Eat Pray Love” is set in Italy, India, and Indonesia and tells us almost nothing about Italians, Indians, or Indonesians…
- Don’t read good travel writing
- And if all else fails, there are still several villas in Italy in need of restoration.
How Bad Writing Can Be Good
Since Bad Writing is so personal, there is no accounting for taste (after all, millions of people did like Eat Pray Love, which I consider the beginning of the fetid psycho- spiritual path of travel writing).
For me, the gauge of really bad writing is if it makes me laugh. There are many excellent examples of atrocious writing online these days. As past BLFC winner Molly Ringle said in an interview, “You kind of have to have a certain amount of skill to write a sentence so bad it would win. You have to work at it.”
Give It a Try: You May Be Magnificently Bad, Too
I’d like to invite you to post your own horrific (but hopefully witty…..no pressure) first sentence of a nonfiction or fiction work. Please make it short and pithy. It can be about any subject you like, but you have more of a chance of getting a useless award from me (perhaps a kepi?) if it is about travel.
As we stepped from the cruise ship’s launch onto the port’s dock, my husband Larry remarked, “This sure looks like a land of contrasts!” something I’ve learned that is true of most lands, except those that are pretty much the same all over — unless you take into account day and night.
I never mention the elusive Larry in my travel blogs…you are in striking range of winning the kepi (since you are the only one who responded so far), but only if you wear it in public for a week and if you knew what it was before I mentioned it.
I know from kepis. Under the current circumstances, wearing it in public for a week would take about a month-and-a-half. Just the same, I’m not counting my kepis before they’re hatched and, if victorious, I promise to act surprised. In the meantime, I’ve adopted Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton as my new spirit animal.
Well, As EGELB-L once said, “A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.” Put that in your kepi or your kepi on it.
His words wove through the wax, stabbed my eardrums, and set my synapses spinning.
A contender—gotta get those ears cleaned tho.
Thanks, Tamar!