Story Link

Civil servant wins prize for truly awful romance
By TOBY HARNDEN in Washington

A Briton has landed a top prize in an international competition that celebrates "truly awful writing."

Kevin Ruston, 38, a civil servant, was declared the winner of the Romance section of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for which contestants were asked to write ghastly opening sentences to imaginary novels.

The entry took him half an hour to compose. "If I was inspired by a particular person, it was the late Dame Barbara Cartland," he said.

There was no monetary prize, said Ruston, simply "the pleasure of knowing you're one of the world's worst writers."

The competition was conceived in 1982 in honour of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, a Victorian novelist. His masterpiece of bad writing was the oft-mocked and parodied opening line of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford: "It was a dark and stormy night ... " It inspired, among others, Snoopy of the Peanuts cartoon strip.

Unlike the Literary Review's Bad Sex Prize, which (dis)honours novelists who unwittingly pen "the most redundant or embarrassing description of a sexual act," entrants to the Bulwer-Lytton contest deliberately try to write as terribly as they can.

Ruston won this year's accolade with the entry: "Their's was a love that transcended time, ran roughshod over moral dogmas, guffawed in the face of adversity, rent asunder the shackles of social convention and took a sledgehammer to the crumbling walls of religious doctrine: a passionate love, a tender love, a selfless love: not bad for two gerbils born on opposite sides of the glass partition."

There were more than 5,000 contestants. The organiser, Scott Rice, an English professor at San Jose State University, California, said: "Entries come in from all over the world."

"Sometimes we see themes emerge. It was nuns one year, murderous spouses another. This year we thought we'd see Harry Potter imitation - but it didn't happen."

Bad writing, he added, was much harder to compose than many would think, comparing to acting drunk on roller skates, a feat which demands considerable skill and dexterity.

Ruston said, ""I was just surfing the internet idly for anything related to literature when I came across the contest.

"I decided to write the beginning of the world's worst romance novel and sent it off but didn't think I'd be eligible to enter, let alone be the winner."
The Daily Telegraph

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Comment:
"Their's was a love that transcended time, ran roughshod over moral dogmas, guffawed in the face of adversity, rent asunder the shackles of social convention and took a sledgehammer to the crumbling walls of religious doctrine: a passionate love, a tender love, a selfless love: not bad for two gerbils born on opposite sides of the glass partition."

Sounds like an OZ civil servant to me.

Regards from Down Under

-- Pieter (zaadz@icisp.net.au), July 13, 2000

Answers

ROTFL! That's "great."

-- David L (bumpkin@dnet.net), July 13, 2000.

Would like to read the runner-up entries...

-- Oxy (Oxsys@aol.com), July 13, 2000.

Complete results of this year's context.

-- David L (bumpkin@dnet.net), July 13, 2000.