It was a dark and stormy opening paragraph; the extravagant tropes and preposterously periodic sentences fell in torrents.

July 16, 2002 6:04 AM

It was a dark and stormy opening paragraph; the extravagant tropes and preposterously periodic sentences fell in torrents. The 2002 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest awards have been announced! If you secretly love prose so bad it's good, the Bulwer-Lytton is for you. A taste:

The blood dripped from his nose like hot grease from a roasting bratwurst pierced with a fork except that grease isn't red and the blood wasn't that hot and it wasn't a fork that poked him in the nose but there was a faint aroma of nutmeg in the air and it is of noses we speak not to mention that if you looked at it in the right profile, his nose did sort of look like a sausage.

posted by Slithy_Tove (6 comments total)

Just what MetaFilter needs: more bad writing.
posted by ColdChef at 6:11 AM on July 16, 2002

Jus' jokin'. I love this contest:

On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.
posted by ColdChef at 6:13 AM on July 16, 2002

"It was then that Caroline remembered her kitchen back in Montana, with a stove that she might or might not have turned off, and so with a heavy sigh, she put down the penguin. "

Class
posted by Frasermoo at 6:36 AM on July 16, 2002

I have never read a sentence more repugnant than this one:

"No use crying over spilt milk" she laughed as she handed him a paper towel to clean up the milk from the toppled carton, which had, in a torrent, poured across the table (a gray formica and chrome art deco reproduction), slowing to a trickle by the time it came to the edge, where it finally dripped to the floor, the droplets exploding on contact and looking like those in the photograph in that old advertisement for the Milk Advisory Board.

Try to make it worse - impossible.

Thanks for ruining my Tuesday afternoon, Slithy_Tove. ;)
posted by MiguelCardoso at 8:12 AM on July 16, 2002

the penguin one actually has roused my curiosity. what was she doing with the penguin?

does anyone else think that the layout for the winning entries is terrible and hard to read? also, why on earth did they put everyone's phone numbers on there?

i never knew that bulwer-lytton was the one who wrote "the pen is mightier than the sword." i did know about "it was a dark and stormy night," though. his legacy lives on!
posted by witchstone at 8:15 AM on July 16, 2002

ColdChef:

Actualy I liked that toilet paper metaphore. It sounds like something out of sinefeild or something.
posted by delmoi at 9:15 AM on July 16, 2002