Cindy Lange-Kubick: It was a dark and stormy night ...
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The letter arrived in the newsroom one dark and stormy afternoon in 1996 — or was it semi-stormy? Partly cloudy, but threatening? Overtly ominous?
Or, wait, did the mail come in the morning?
I can no longer recall.
To read all the best worst winners of the 2008 Dark and Stormy Night fiction writing contest go to www.bulwer-lytton.com
I do know I was at my desk, preparing to drown my writer’s block woes in a dank pot of over-brewed Joe spiked with vodka, cheap as a pair of Kmart flip-flops, which I poured from a tiny bottle hidden in my desk drawer, saved from the halcyon days of free airline booze and stewardesses in tight skirts that showed off their plump, rounded Buns-of-Steel bottoms.
My editor flung the letter down, and I read between the red-inked scribblings and copious exclamation points.
“Please tell me the lead on Cindy Lange-Kubick’s story was intended as an entry into the World’s Worst Writing Contest!!!”
Robert Robeson must know how I felt.
Except he wrote his bad lead on purpose.
And the Lincoln man sent it off to the unofficial home of the real World’s Worst Writing Contest, along with 7,000 other writers of purposefully purple prose, hoping to be ranked worst of the worst.
And he was.
At least in the detective category — for a 60-word first sentence of a potboiler that had nowhere to go but up.
Mike Hummer had been a private detective so long he could remember Preparation A, his hair reminded everyone of a rat who’d bitten into an electrical cord, but he could still run faster than greased owl snot when he was on a bad guy’s trail, and they said his friskings were a lot like getting a vasectomy at Sears.
Preparation A? Friskings?
“I sat down and thought of all the weird things a detective would be involved in and went from there,” explained the retired Army man.
“People don’t realize it’s hard to write bad like that.“
Tell me about it, Robert.
The 65-year-old said he’s published more than 700 articles and short stories in his 40 years of composing prose. Children’s books. Nonfiction pieces for military and religious publications. Sports stories.
Last year, he bought his first computer and started looking for contests. The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest looked intriguing.
It’s the oldest bad writing competition around, said Scott Rice, who came up with the idea in 1982 as a graduate student at San Jose State.
He and his buddies named the contest for Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton a Victorian novelist known for his clumsy, overblown writing.
And his infamous opening line: It was a dark and stormy night…
Now Rice is a semi-retired English teacher and his e-mail fills every day with the trashiest opening lines ever.
He winnows away until only the most unseemly metaphors and painfully pretentious paragraphs remain and then farms the finalists out to be judged.
Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber …
The mongrel dog began to lick her cheek voraciously with his sopping wet tongue, so wide and flat and soft, a miniature pink fleshy cape soaked through and oozing with liquid salivary gratitude…
The pancake batter looked almost perfect, like the morning sun shining on the cream-colored bare shoulder of a gorgeous young blonde driving 30 miles over the speed limit…
I’d labored over that 1996 lead the letter-writer abhorred.
“A modern parable,” it began, striving for just the right balance of cleverness and gravitas befitting the stature of the Lincoln Electric System’s retiring leader. It continued:
In 1971 Walter A. Canney said: ‘Let there be light.’
And there was light.
And it was good.
And then, after 25 years — he rested...
OK. So it wasn’t great. But it wasn’t all that bad.
Or at least not bad enough to be worthy of entry into the World’s Worst.
Not like Mr. Robeson’s work.
The work of a dedicated hack — also the winner of a “dishonorable mention” for the line “so maybe love is a bad archer with a low IQ — but you couldn’t carve a finer or shapelier figure out of a hedge” — who plans to do it all again next year.
“I’ll try to do something better,” the writer says.
“Or is that worse?”
Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.
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Big Chief wrote on August 17, 2008 10:17 am:
Never read a CLK article with a mouthful of hot coffee! "
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