(no subject)

[alison-sky.livejournal.com]

Gods, I love katiemacalister today. She posted another funny. This is for all my author friends, so I'm gonna crosspost this on NaNoWriMo.

http://www2.sjsu.edu/depts/english/2004.htm

Comments

[agbirdie.livejournal.com]

My absolute fav:

Dishonorable Mention
As he entered the room within which so many a wild night of their sweltering love affair had been spent, the White Rabbit regarded her with benevolent eyes, her posture such that he suspected something was wrong, but before he could speak Alice unburied her face from her trembling hands and between her intense sobs he made out the words, "I'm late . . . I'm late."

[the-mongrel.livejournal.com]

ha ha! I liked that one the best too :-)

It's become a dim and blustery contest

[jenstewboyd.livejournal.com]

Ehh.. Bulwer-Lytton ain't what it usta be. I've been increasingly unhappy with it, and recent years have all but put me off completely.

In the beginning, it was a great idea: Write the first line of a bad novel. In those days, the writers were writing only for themselves, and for the judges, and only the winners were published, usually in a wire story circulated in a few hundred domestic papers. In those days, it was about the writing, and the entries were deliciously subtle and carefully crafted. Here is the winning entry from 1983, the second year the contest was held:

The camel died quite suddenly on the second day, and Selena fretted sulkily and, buffing her already impeccable nails--not for the first time since the journey began--pondered snidely if this would dissolve into a vignette of minor inconveniences like all the other holidays spent with Basil.
--Gail Cain, San Francisco, California

The first couple years were like that. But starting in 1983, the popularity and publicity of the event spread very quickly, and Scott Rice starting putting out inexpensive annual collections, available in chain bookstores. Very quickly, the clever writing aspect of the contest all but vanished, and it degenerated into a cheap vaudeville game of cheeky one-liners and half-witted puns. Here is the actual winning entry from the very next year, 1984:

The lovely woman-child Kaa was mercilessly chained to the cruel post of the warrior-chief Beast, with his barbarous tribe now stacking wood at her nubile feet, when the strong, clear voice of the poetic and heroic Handsomas roared, "Flick your Bic, crisp that chick, and you'll feel my steel through your last meal."
--Steven Garman, Pensacola, Florida

Funny? Sure, of course. Clever writing? Ehh.. well, matter of opinion, perhaps. Deliciously subtle? Like 'death by chocolate' cake smothered in steaming hot fudge, served by a train of singing waiters banging gongs. Subtle? Not very.

The two factors contributing to B-W's rapid decline were the new publicity, in which the contributing writers now had an automatically appreciative audience of other contributors, and wrote to them instead of to the original point of the contest, and the judges -- Rice and others -- who chose such un-clever entries for winners, over others that many of us -- some of us contributors ourselves -- felt were more deserving. Here, for example, is my personal favourite entry from 1988:

Edmond waited, then, immediately, waited again.
-- Donald Smyth (Cocoa, Florida)

And here is the chosen winner from that same year:

Like an expensive sports car, fine-tuned and well-built, Portia was sleek, shapely, and gorgeous, her red jumpsuit molding her body, which was as warm as the seatcovers in July, her hair as dark as new tires, her eyes flashing like bright hubcaps, and her lips as dewy as the beads of fresh rain on the hood; she was a woman driven--fueled by a single accelerant--and she needed a man, a man who wouldn't shift from his views, a man to steer her along the right road, a man like Alf Romeo.
--Rachel E. Sheeley, Williamsburg, Indiana

Now, if you like the winner better, then you disagree with my view, and that's fine. But if you like Smyth's better, then you, also, prefer subtlety and cleverness over stand-up comedy. After all, we've already got humour writing. How is a funny line an example of deliberately 'bad' writing?

It reminds me of a disappointing trend in poetry events that emerged a few years ago: music, rap, and comedy. Now, I've got nothing against urban poetry, or musically-influenced poetry (like, say, the entire beat period), and funny poetry. But when poetry is almost wholly displaced by singing, street rap, and comedy, one wonders: a) what's the point of music, rap, and comedy, and b) what's the point of separate 'poetry' events. I once told a friend that someday, I was going to show up at a music open mike or an open rap-off, and just stand up there and do poetry. Why not? Fair's fair, right?

So for many of us, it's a terrible disappointment that Rice has let his contest decline into this game of cheap comedy. Where do we go now to find authentically clever bad writing?

Re: It's become a dim and blustery contest

[jenstewboyd.livejournal.com]

I want to add that I'm as guilty of this as anyone else. The 'funny' angle is very hard to resist, and I was as drawn into as anyone else. In the early 90's, an ex girlfriend and I wrote some submissions together, none of which were, as I read them now, very good. We did, however, try to play to the 'less is more' motif that we liked about entries in earlier years.

Here's an example: Our story begins in the desolate Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula, but thankfully, very little of actually takes place there. See what I mean? Funny, perhaps, but hardly clever. Here's another: "Well, I'll be a son of a bitch," said Atterson, and so he was. Neither really does anything to promote the mystique of 'bad' writing. This one is a bit better: "Trees! Trees! Trees!" he cried, but already it was too late. Other than the use of an unnecessary adverb, it's not exactly 'bad,' however.

The truth is, as we discovered very quickly, that truly 'bad' writing is actually pretty difficult. It's very easy to resort to cheap gimmicks, then, and a few of these I really did appreciate, the ones that were more odd and unexpected. (One lengthy entry incoporated thirteen concentrically nested parenthetical clauses, all resolving at the same point, so that the sentence ended with a string of thirteen 'close' parentheses. Very cute.) But for the most part, actually clever 'bad' writing became a rarity after the first few years, and with the judges voting for best one-liner instead of cleverest, there was less and less incentive to make a real effort of it.