July 14, 1999
Web posted at: 4:57 p.m. EDT (2057 GMT)

In this story: Victory is a double-edged sword Bad writing has planetwide appeal 'Best bad writing is by good people' RELATED STORIES, SITES

(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.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.