Bad writing contest: an award no writer wants
For most writers, winning an award or contest is a great honor, and for a novice scribe, can really get their literary career moving. Many awards, aside from offering a monetary award, can also be the key to the world of publishing.
But there is one award I don’t think any serious writer wants to even be associated with. It’s the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest sponsored by San Jose State University. Whereas most writing contests look for the best, this contest looks for the worst. It’s the one award where cliches, bad metaphors, incoherent sentences, and overall bad prose can earn you this prestiges prize.
And this year’s winner is Jim Gleeson, 47, from Madison, Wisconsin. He won with this opening passage:
Gerald began — but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them ‘permanently’ meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash — to pee.
So how does a budding writer prepare to win this contest with such prose? Gleeson credits college, of all places, with preparing him to write the worst:
Gleeson credited his time in college with preparing him well. "There’s a certain degree to which academia prepares you to write badly," Gleeson said wryly.
I guess it depends on what you study in college. Certainly subjects like engineering, math and maybe some of the sciences can produce plenty of bad writers. In fact, at my university, the engineering department had a tutoring agreement with the English department because the engineering students couldn’t put two sentences together.
But that’s getting off-topic. What does Gleeson get for his horrible prose? $250 and bragging rights to winning a bad writing contest.
Check out this cnn.com article that was the source for this post:
Winner: Bad writing learned in college
