Science Fiction - ″Far out in the backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun, and orbiting this at a distance of roughly 899,010,000 miles is the flash-frozen body of Farley Wilsputz Jr., and boy is there an interesting story of how he came to be a component of Saturn’s ring system.″ By Richard Garrett, Pittsburgh, Pa. Here, for better or worse, are some of the category winners: Rice, who has published several books from the entries over the years, sees the contest as a way to encourage people to have fun with language and make a statement, in a way, about the importance of literacy.īulwer-Lytton earned the honor of a contest in his name by beginning his 1830 novel ″Paul Clifford″ with that pot-boiling opener popular with Snoopy of Peanuts fame: ″It was a dark and stormy night.″ In a more inspired moment, Bulwer-Lytton, also originated the line ″the pen is mightier than the sword.″ ″Since both parties demanded sole custody in the Frankenstein divorce case, the judge called for his Sword-of-Solomon bolt-cutters and ruled an equitable split: Victor was to raise the creature’s grotesque body in Palo Alto while his ex-wife reared its ugly head in San Jose.″ Carter, of Hampton, Va., took a more gruesome tone in his tome. ″This is a good start, but I hope this is not the peak of my career.″ ″It takes a lot of talent to be a bad writer,″ she said. She won a word processor for capturing the grand prize. Vernon, a 38-year-old homemaker and mother of three, is taking writing courses at Ohlone College but has yet to be paid for any of her freelance work. ″Dolores breezed along the surface of her life like a flat stone forever skipping along smooth water, rippling reality sporadically but oblivious to it consistently, until she finally lost momentum, sank and, due to an overdose of fluoride as a child which caused her to suffer from chronic apathy, doomed herself to lie forever on the floor of her life as useless as an appendix and as lonely as a five-hundred pound barbell in a steroid-free fitness center.″

If you’re reading aloud, take a breath and give it try: Her winning sentence, 80 words of mixed metaphors and overdone images, is ″an example of a writer getting carried away with figures of speech,″ said San Jose State University English professor Scott Rice, who originated the contest nine years ago. The competition takes its name from the infamously inept 19th century novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Linda Vernon of Newark, Calif., came up with a leaden lead to an imaginary novel that topped some 10,000 other entries worldwide in the contest that honors intentionally bad writing. SAN FRANCISCO (AP) _ The best of the worst writing, prose that went beyond purple into the darker blueness of the literary spectrum, spewed tastelessly forth from the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest on Thursday.

Lyttony of grand prize winners