The Best in Terrible Writing

If you can't be the best, you may as well be the worst. Or so thought David McKenzie, 55, grand-prize winner of San Jose State University's annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The annual worldwide literary parody contest seeks the absolute worst beginning to an imaginary novel, inspired by the eponymous Victorian Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel, Paul Clifford, began with the oft-mocked, "It was a dark and stormy night."

The San Jose Mercury News reports the winning verse: "Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the Ellie May, a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish." Now that's some bad writing!

Scott Rice, the contest's creator, shared some insight behind the win. "The judges liked his sentence because of the way it pulls the rug from under the reader. You compose yourself to hear about another wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, then find that it's just about some drunks having a screaming contest."

This isn't McKenzie's first attempt at sucking. "The contest has allowed me to have fun as a wordsmith and keep my comedic edge sharp," he said. In the past he's taken home top prizes in the children's and Western literature categories, but this time he was the best of the worst.

Some other top entries:

•    "How best to pluck the exquisite Toothpick of Ramses from between a pair of acrimonious vipers before the demonic Guards of Nicobar returned should have held Indy's full attention, but in the back of his mind he still wondered why all the others who had agreed to take part in his wife's holiday scavenger hunt had been assigned to find stuff like a Phillips screwdriver or blue masking tape," from Joe Wyatt of Amarillo, Texas, winner in the adventure category.

•    "She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida the pink ones, not the white ones except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn't wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren't," from Eric Rice of Sun Prairie, Wis., winner in the detective category.