> 'Obscure bureaucrat' wins bad writing contest
>
> July 14, 1999 Web posted at: 4:57 p.m. EDT (2057 GMT)
>
>
> (CNN) -- Was it "dark and stormy"? Maybe not, but it was night when a bored
> British civil servant, inspired by tales of gloom and catastrophe, conjured
> up the winner for an annual bad writing contest.
>
> David Chuter, who describes himself as a "harmless and rather obscure
> bureaucrat," said he wrote the winning sentence in what he called "a moment
> of total insanity."
>
> He was the first non-American to win the top (dis)honor in the Bulwer-Lytton
> Fiction Contest. The contest is named after Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, the
> Victorian novelist famous for the opening sentence "It was a dark and stormy
> night" from his 1830 novel "Paul Clifford."
>
> Competition organizer Scott Rice of California's San Jose State University
> said Chuter, 47, greased the competition with the following prose:
>
> "Through the gathering gloom of a late-October afternoon, along the greasy,
> cracking paving-stones slick from the sputum of the sky, Stanley Ruddlethorp
> wearily trudged up the hill from the cemetery where his wife, sister,
> brother, and three children were all buried, and forced open the door of his
> decaying house, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that was soon to
> devastate his life."
>
> Victory is a double-edged sword. Chuter said he had mixed feelings about
> winning. "The first thought I had was 'Oh, good!' The second thought I had
> was 'Oh, no!'"
>
> Chuter, who has a doctorate in English literature, said he would now be
> deemed totally unreliable. Chuter said he was inspired by stories from
> England's North Country, a fading industrial region, and
> John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath."
>
> "The interesting thing about parody is how far you can take it before you
> fall off the edge," he said in a telephone interview from London. "You begin
> with a certain theme like gloom and doom and death and things and see how
> long you can continue."
>
> Bad writing has planetwide appeal. The idea for the bad writing contest
> emerged in 1983, Rice said. "It started out as kind of a lark," he said in a
> telephone interview. "Universities are always having literary contests
> that generate a lot of bad writing, so we decided to sponsor one of our
> own."
>
> Thousands now enter the contest, with entries from as far away as Saudi
> Arabia and Singapore. Rice whittles down the most promising entries and then
> presents the best of the worst to a "panel of undistinguished judges" made
> up of colleagues at the university.
>
> 'Best bad writing is by good people' Crafting a winning "bad" sentence is
> not as easy as it might seem. It's not just your average Joe who can come up
> with something truly bad,
> Rice said.
>
> "We do get generally bad writers, but the best (bad) writing is by good
> people," Rice said.
>
> Other efforts commended by the judges included:
>
> "Her breasts were like ripe strawberries, but much bigger, a completely
> different color, not as bumpy, and without the little green things on top."
> "George stared intently across
> the table which supported the golden-brown fresh-baked cornbread with butter
> and sizzling cholesterol-laden bacon which could finish blocking his
> previously hardened arteries at
> any time, into Margerie's clear-blue eyes and realized that she knew what he
> knew, and she knew that he knew what she knew, and he must practice carpe
> diem before angina seized the day."
>
> But wait, there's more!
>
> David Hirsch of Seattle won in the Purple Prose category with this opening
> line:
>
> "Rain -- violent torrents of it, rain like fetid water from a God-sized pot
> of pasta strained through a sky-wide colander, rain as Noah knew it,
> flaying the shuddering trees, whipping the
> whitecapped waters, violating the sodden firmament, purging purity and filth
> alike from the land, rain without mercy, without surcease, incontinent rain,
> turning to intermittent showers overnight with partial clearing Tuesday."
>
> And Wendy Lawton of Hilmar, California, captured the children's literature
> prize with:
>
> "The greedy schoolbus crept through the streets devouring clumps of
> children until its belly groaned with surfeit, then lumbered back to the
> schoolhouse where it obligingly regurgitated its meal
> onto the grounds."
>
> In keeping with the stature and dignity of the competition, winners receive
> the traditional award: zilch.
>
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