Join
the Pack:
Granted, it is a fulsomely salutary experience to parody bad writing, to
comment on The Sad State Of Literacy by composing deliberate travesties of
literary ineptitude. That is what the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is all
about (that and the universal improvement of mankind). But how can people of
our kidney rest there? The cause of enlightenment--the promotion of clear,
effective communication and the future of civilization itself--demands that we
take a more direct and muscular approach. It demands that we move from
generalities to specifics. It demands that we rattle the cages of the offending
scribes.
The aforesaid having been said, we propose a new pastime for Bulwervians everywhere. We the custodians, guardians, and
stewards of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest propose a new game. We propose
that you locate, isolate, and otherwise identify samples of bad published
writing (that is, writing by those who are paid to write), and that you submit
them to this page along with any commentary you wish to provide.
That is right! We are offering you the opportunity to display your wit and
judgment at someone else's expense, the expense of someone fortunate enough to
be paid to write. With a little luck, you may even threaten someone's
livelihood. If this is not incentive enough, you may at least have the
satisfaction of knowing that you are contributing to An International Dialogue
on Literacy (sniff!).
A few simple guidelines:
[#1]
"She
wore a dress the same color as her eyes her father brought her from San
Francisco."
--Danielle
Steel, Star
In this case, we are viewing a pristine instance of syntactic incompetence. The
phraseology suggests that her father brought her eyes from San Francisco, not a
dress, although the latter is the writer's obvious intention. You can argue
that sense overrules the word sequencing, but should the reader have to guess
what a professional writer is trying to say ("You said this but you meant
to say that!")? Granted, reading is a participatory act, and every piece
of good writing carries the implicit instructions, "Some assembly
required." Good books demand good readers, even nimble readers. Put
another way, good writing asks the reader to play Ginger Rogers to the writer's
Fred Astaire. Nevertheless, Fred would never signal Ginger that he was doing
the Fox Trot when he was really doing the Funky Chicken.
From Steel's sentence
we learn that clear writing is a matter of effective sequencing. A sentence,
whether it is in a novel or a technical report, is a sequence of information.
Good writing is good sequencing. At least in this reporter's
opinion.
The word on the
street, by the way, is that Danielle does not actually "write" her
books. She dictates them to a tape recorder, then lets
someone else type them up. Apparently, to borrow what Hemingway said of
Gertrude Stein, revision is an activity that gives her no pleasure.
[Contributor: Scott
Rice, San Jose, CA]
[#2]
I was reading - attempting to read - a book over the weekend which brought Dark
and Stormy to mind. The majority of sentences are over 60 words. Picked at
random are a few shorter sentences for your interest.
a) "He spun round in the doorway with a
violence that was tangible, surveying her bitterly with hard, blazing eyes
before banging the door so savagely that the whole room shuddered and whimpered
before sinking into an unearthly silence."
b) "They had only known each other for the
last four months, Claire having come to work at the surgery following a long
spell in hospital after a severe road accident, but the two of them had
immediately hit it off." (Apart from this enlightening entry Claire
has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the book.)
c) "The possessiveness in his voice was deep
and strong, its triumphant throb cutting through the layers of sexual delight
as thoroughly as a knife through warm butter, and it hit her like a deluge of
cold water."
d) "Donato nodded in
a sharp little bow, clicking his fingers at Antonio, who reached behind her for
the case, his pock-marked face beneath its chauffeur's cap of blue and gold
apologetic."
e) "The fifty-or-so-mile drive to Donato's magnificent villa in Sorrento would be no problem
- the Mercedes' excellent air conditioning added to the fact that the
late-April temperature was only just touching seventy degrees made travelling
at midday still a pleasure, unlike in high summer - but sitting in close
proximity to Donato for well over an hour was a
different matter."
--Helen
Brooks, Husband by Contract (Harlequin)
[Contributor: Su
Irons, Auckland, New Zealand]
[#3]
Your new "Sticks & Stones" category wouldn't be complete without mentioning
Norman Mailer's misplaced modifier in the first line of "Harlot's
Ghost" (Random House, 1991), the first novel to cost more than $30, which
began:
"On a late winter evening in 1983, while
driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began
to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki
Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years
ago."
The pundits had a field day with this one, correctly inquiring as to how
"recollections" could "drive." It also inspired my own BLFC
entry as follows:
"Driving along the main coastline, my recollections clasped the leather stickshift of my 91 Harlotte and
shoved it into overdrive, catapulting the lengthy vehicle past three ten-spots;
past a random house; and finally past the limits of Hyperbole, into the
uncharted depths beyond."
[Contributor: Chuck
Myer, Colfax, CA (1997 BLFC Western runner-up)]
[#4]
No,
he looked like a compassionate rapist.
"Anthony Rowley didn't look like a
self-confessed sadistic rapist."
--Sarah
Lovett, Acquired Motives
I was at the check-out counter at the grocery store and happened to pick this
up. I know a good opening sentence is supposed to grab the reader, but where?
The implied formula here seems to be: sensationalism=good writing. I want a
little more subtlety in my reading, something that assumes I have some brains
and an attention span.
[Contributor: Gene
M., Yakima, Washington]
[#5]
"Why
do nuts women always have cats? Why not dogs, dogs who are just as excited to
see you after you drive up to the corner to get milk as they were when they
first met you, instead of cats, who, as Pat always said, regarded people as
warm-blooded furniture? To keep her eyes to herself, Beth stared down at Loreta's ample thigh in its armor of polyester, a blue that
did not exist in nature. Why did nuts women aged about sixty-five who kept cats
also wear stretch pants? With flowered blouses that looked chosen carefully for
their potential to make the wearer look like ten miles of bad road under a
tablecloth? Because something like these clothes had looked good on them when
they were young? Because everything else looked worse?
As she let her glance slide upward to Loretta's tightly furled perm, like a
head of late-spring buds, she heard the woman ask Candy, "So,
do you want me to do a trance? Or just give you some impressions?"
--Jacquelyn Mitchard, The Deep End
of the Ocean (p. 106)
The Commentary: You'll have to pardon
me for such a lengthy submittal, but rest assured that I omitted the first part
of the paragraph which, in its entirety, might in itself
contain enough exemplary material for an entire course in how not to write. The
sentence fragments. Since when did "nuts" become an adjective? We're
all just lucky that the author didn't enter this material in the BLFC, or we
would all be one step lower in the rankings. At least.
[Contributor: Larry Sherman, Fremont,
California]
[#6]
And this," Pauline continued, indicating the
largest of the three men, "is Mr. Earl. He's your security guard, and
he'll shadow you until the jewels are returned all in one piece."
Laura smiled charmingly at the beefy young guard, whose massive shoulders and
biceps threatened to split the seams of his rented dinner jacket.
"'Ello, Miss," he said, politely touching
his forehead with a finger in a kind of salute. "It's a right 'onor. 'Course, my old mum an' I,
we seen all yer pictures. She's a great fan 'o yers, is me mum"
--Joan
Collins, Hell Hath No Fury (unpublished)
This is my favorite excerpt from the unpublished oeuvre of actress/author(?)
Joan Collins. The work was never published because Random House, with whom she
had a contract to write two books, alleged that the manuscript she delivered, Hell
Hath No Fury, was unusable and sued her for the return of their advance.
[Contributor: Jeff Vorzimmer, Austin]
[#7]
With little fanfare, in 1988 or 1989, possibly the worst written book ever
published came out. Zebra press, known for its "Men's Adventure"
novels, released Bodysmasher by Jan Stacy. The
premise gave notice of how bad it was to be; something to the effect of
"Not only is Rick Harrison the world's best professional wrestler, he's
also the CIA's most top secret operative."
Despite touching on
just about every cheesy cliché from the mad scientist who wants to destroy the
world, to the evil Russian wrestler who kills people in the ring (hey, it was
the cold war still!!) and, of course, the mysterious Asian spiritual mentor,
this classic gave us such literary gems as: "She
wanted to wrap her legs around him the way a tree wraps itself around a
mountain" and the ever popular "She
rode astride him like a bucking bronco in the rodeo of the flesh."
[Contributor: Colin
Fisk, Fremont, CA]
[#8]
"He was as guarded as a virgin, but infinitely
more experienced."
This, um, remarkable
statement refers to the heroic Irish terrorist Seaneen
O'Sullivan in Cathy Cash Spellman's novel An Excess of Love. In truth, I
found this book, which follows the fortunes of two sisters around the time of
Ireland's Easter Rising in 1916, very entertaining. I even picked up a little
history. However, it's been at least five years since I read An Excess of
Love, and I still remember how I howled with laughter upon reading this
line, which, when taken in context, does not appear to have anything to do with
Seaneen's sex life.
[Contributor: Kate
Nagy, Bethesda, MD]
[#9]
The following excerpt is from "The CNE Study Guide" written by David
James Clarke, who attempts an analogy to help better the understanding of the
term "Flow Control" in networking.
"Let's
say you're moving to a bigger, better home. You've been working all day,
lugging around boxes, and you're thirsty. Unfortunately, the soda's
on the counter and your hands are full of boxes. So what do you do? You ask
your friend to give you a drink. He or she pours it down your throat with no
sense of when is enough. After a few gulps, you decide you don't want to drown
in Coke and start waving your arms and nodding you head. Your friend gets the
message and stops pouring the drink. This is flow control."
To start with, how can one wave their arms if they're full.
That's what prompted this stupid analogy in the first place. Next, if they
started nodding their head, the soda would be spilling all over the place. Not
a pretty picture. But, let's face it, this whole scenario could be elevated if
this person just had enough sense to put the boxes down and get the drink on
their own. Some people are just lazy.
[Contributor: Wallace
Frost, Media, PA]
[#10]
As you may know, the New York Times began this very week to publish
color photographs in the Living Arts Section. One must occassionally
accept such clumsy lurches into the modern era. However, lurking behind the
visual gloss was an even more menacing species of written dross. The following
was excerpted from the Op. Ed. page of today's NYT. Both great art and great
crap routinely defy description, so I present them unadorned without the
handicap of my own ornate, brocade, reticulated, spiffy commentary. These are
just a few of my favorite passages. True Bulwerians
will wish to relish the whole tamale.
"Rising
from some elusive and overwrought part of the equatorial sea at least five degress hotter than it's supposed to be, El Nino is a
mysterious U.F.O. of rain and wind thousands of miles wide hovering
mysteriously out in the Pacific, the monstrous meteorological butterfly that
flaps its wings on the other side of the world and gives you a balmy winter in
Manhattan."
"Tremulous
hopes of Pacific disaster spring eternal in the East Coast hearts. We know
this; you hate us; it's O.K. In the Moment of the Held Breath (author's long
shorthand for California) we've lived with the resentment of the age as
routinely as we live with the news of El Nino because, as old hands at
apocalypse, our own particular narcissism is such that we not only expect El
Nino, but we also hope for it."
"Living
in California, we define ourselves by chaos; the pending cataclysm, whatever it
might be at any given moment, reminds us who we are. As with the house I live
in [note: author describes it as "launching out from a hillside and over a
chasm below, away from the land and into the air."] the very occupation of
California--a fractured, partially liquefied terrain of arid deserts, hostile
mountains, dense woods and craggy seashores--is an act of recklessness, it's
motivated by both the hubris of transcendence and the rapture of
self-annihilation. More than merely believing we're the only ones who actually
deserve El Nino, we need (author italicizes 'need'). Take our apocalypse from
us, and we are nothing."
And
finally . . .
"As
it happens, maternity wards report that veritable monsoons of babies are born
during storms and full moons, and since our kid's due date coincides not only
with the the rains but with the full moon as well,
we're preparing for him to come blowing out of my wife in such a gust that it
will take the combined efforts of doctors, nurses, midwives, orderlies,
physical therapists, security guards, parking attendants and previously
comatose patients to lash the little sucker down. He will be an El Nino baby
lit with demon moonlight, a child of chaos like the rest of us, counting down
the minutes to the end of the world like the drops of rain that would wash us
away."
--Steve
Erickson, "Cloudy, Chance of Annihilation"
"El Nino"
is colloquial Spanish for the Christ Child. Heaven help us, writing like this
must be a sin.
[Contributor: John Ormsby, Berkeley]
[#11]
Lytton was not the
only bad writer of his day, not by a long shot. As a mangler
of prose, he had plenty of company. One group of purple prose artists was
featured in "The Lily Series," a stream of wholesome novels spewed
forth on both sides of the Atlantic. The publishers explained their morally
uplifting (and doubtlessly lucrative) mission this way:
"The
design of this Series is to include no books except such as are peculiarly
adapted by their high tone, pure taste, and thorough principles to be read by
those persons, young and old, who look upon books as upon their friends--only
worthy to be received into the Family Circle for their good qualities and
excellent characters. In view of this design, no author whose name is not a
guarantee of the real worth of his or her work or whose book has not been
subject to rigid examination, will be admitted into the
'Lily Series.'"
By the time Faith Gartney's Girlhood was released in the series,
seventy-eight titles had displayed sufficient "high tone, pure taste, and
thorough principles" to pass the publisher's "rigid
examination." Among the classics of the series were Quinnebasset
Girls, How Marjorie Helped, and Madeleine: A Story of French Love
(which couldn't have been as interesting as the title sounds). As for the
stylistic standards, well, they were downright Lyttonian:
"East
or West, it matters not where--the story may, doubtless, indicate something of
the latitude and longitude as it proceeds--in the city of Mishaumok,
lived Henderson Gartney, Esq., one of those American
gentlemen of whom, if she were ever canonized, Martha of Bethany must be the
patron saint--if again, feminine celestials, sainthood once achieved through
the weary experience of earth, don't know better than to assume such charge of
wayward man--born, as they are, seemingly, to the life-destiny of being ever
'careful and troubled about many things.'"
--Adeline
Dutton Whitney, Faith Gartney's Girlhood, 1863
Whitney's mortal pen also gave those
"who look upon books as upon their friends" A Summer in Leslie
Goldthwaite's Life."
[Contributor: Stanley Perks, Boca
Raton, Florida]
[#12]
Herewith two actually published
snippets. The first is from the recently published The Atonement and Other
Stories Louis Auchincloss; it's the opening
sentence of the story "Ars Gratia Artis", and comes as close to Paulcliffordism
as anything I've seen. (Perhaps Auchincloss aspires
to a Bulwer laureateship?) The second is the opening of a godawful
Victorian novel, The History of Sir Richard Calmady : A Romance, by
Lucas Malet.
"Living
in the past is constantly derided, particularly by those who like to pride
themselves on being abreast, if not actually ahead of, the passing moment, but
there comes a time in life for some of us, alas, when it seems the only place
where we can live; and that is certainly the case of an infirm and antiquated
bachelor living alone (except for a loyal caretaker and an uncertain cleaning
woman) in his old family stone gentilhommie`re
(I'm sorry; I like the French term) on the Yorkshire moors."
"In
that fortunate hour of English history, when the cruel sights and haunting
insecurities of the Middle Ages had passed away, and while, as yet, the fanatic
zeal of Puritanism had not cast its blighting shadow over all merry and
pleasant things, it seemed good to one Denzil Calmady, esquire, to build himself a stately red-brick and
freestone house upon the southern verge of the great plateau of moorland which
ranges northward to the confines of Windsor Forest and eastward to the Surrey
Hills. And this he did in no vainglorious spirit, with purpose of exalting
himself above the county gentlemen, his neighbours,
and showing how far better lined his pockets were than theirs. Rather did and
comely, and as the natural outgrowth of an inquiring and philosophic mind.
[Contributor: Fr.
John Woolley, Denver]
COMMENT:
This is a first-person narration. Would you criticize Marlon Brando for Stanley
Kowalski's speech? [Or Tennessee Williams?]
Dennis Mahony :
dmahony@prodigy.net
[#13]
"Actually,
you might say that it's more accurately been a battle between warring factions
of fans who, for more than 30 years, have chosen sides, gathered behind the
flapping banners of either the Mustang or Camaro, and proceeded to cross swords
at virtually every drag strip and roadrace course in
the country (as well as any intersection with a red light that eventually turns
reen)."
--Guy
Spangenberg, "Ford SVT Mustang Cobra vs.
Chevrolet Camaro Z28", Road and Track, November, 1997.
[Contributor: Greg
George, Cincinnati, Ohio]
[#14]
"Trying
to diffuse the crisis, Secretary General Kofi Annan offered yesterday to send a
mission to Iraq to defuse the crisis."
The above appeared
under a Reuters and New York Times byline in an article published in the
Toronto Globe and Mail. It deals with Sadaam
Hussein's refusal to allow Americans to be part of a UN weapons inspection
team. Apparently, Mr. Annan wants others to share in the U.S.'s problem by
spreading it around.
[Contributor: Boris Krivy, Toronto]
[#15]
Every time I go to
the library, I like to get out a few books by authors I have never heard of,
just to make sure I'm not missing out on good books merely because they aren't
well known. Occasionally, this effort turns up gold. Frequently, however, it
brings me into contact with authors whose obscurity is eminently justifiable.
The most recent example of that kind had me worried when I encountered the
following line in the first paragraph:
"She
popped the elastic at the top of the second sock and pushed her sexually
ambiguous Timed watch up along the blond hairs of her
handsome forearms."
--POB2,
A Love Story, Steve Whalen
First - Sexually ambiguous watch? I have yet to meet a watch whose gender I
could not identify - they don't have one. Or perhaps Mr. Whalen means the watch
is attracted to both men and women? Second - A semi-reasonable meaning can
eventually be grasped for the above, at least after wading through some of the
more vivid images the odd phrase brings to mind, but what on earth does the
verb "popped" mean in this context? What precisely is she doing with
her second sock? Third - Why does NEARLY EVERY NOUN have an at least one
adjective? Do we really need to be informed, all in the same sentence,
that it was the "second" sock and a "sexually
ambiguous" watch and there were "blond" hairs on her
"handsome" forearms? This trend is continued throughout the book - in
the next paragraph, she straightens a comforter her grandmother made, and as
she stares at the "antique" headboard and "fading"
bedspread she can see the "gentle, arthritic" hands of the
"old" woman etc., etc., etc. Part of bad writing is an uncanny knack
for choosing the wrong word - the word that doesn't quite mean what the author
wants, or makes the sentence cliche, or is odd
without being interesting, or boringly repetitive, or just plain wildly
inappropriate. This author, in a very short space, has managed all of those -
an impressive achievement.
In addition, the sex scenes in the novel are among the most boring I have ever
read in my life.
[Contributor: Jeffry
Herman, Somerville, MA.]
[#16]
"
Even before the deal with Straker had been
consummated (that's some word all right, he thought, and his eyes crawled over
the front of his secretary's blouse), Lawrence Crockett was, without doubt, the
richest man in 'Salem's Lot and one of the richest in Cumberland County,
although there was nothing about his office or his person to indicate it."
This comes from
Stephen King's novel Salem's Lot, and for me, the imagery of those happy
little eyeballs is a bit startling to say the least!
[Contributor: Kaye Bellot, Modesto, CA]
[#17]
"Eighteen
years ago, on the night of her eighth birthday, in a seaside cottage on Key
West, Chyna had squirmed under her bed to hide from
Jim Woltz, her mother's friend. A storm had been
raging from the Gulf of Mexico, and the sky-blistering lightning had made her
fearful of scaping to the sanctuary of the beach
where she'd retreated on other nights. After committing herself to the cramped
space under that iron bed, which had been lower slung that this one, she had discovered that she was sharing it with a
palmetto beetle. Palmettos were not as exotic or as pretty as their name. In
fact, they were nothing more than enormous tropical cockroaches."
-- Dean Koontz, Intensity
Frankly, this passage
frightens me on a number of levels.
[Contributor: Jordan
J. Earl, Asheville, NC]
[#18]
Am I overreacting?
The first sentence of chapter one reads:
By the end of the alley the fine hairs in my
nostrils were starting to twitch.
Lindsey Davis, Shadows in Bronze
[Contributor
?]
[#19]
I am still trying to interpret this!
"Having
had time to think it over, Andrew had decided that he did not believe in this
for a moment. If he had not been so unfortunate at different times during the
last few years as to become involved in the solution of a murder or two, so
that he was more inclined than he would have been before he had been drawn into
that rather gruesome activity to think that his own wild guesses were sometimes
perhaps to be taken seriously, he would not even have considered such a
possibility."
-- E X Ferrars, A Murder Too Many
[Contributor: Sue
D'Arcy, Northern Territory, Australia]
[#20]
On October 17, 1997
Matt Hayes of the Jacksonville Times Union wrote:
"The son called his mother two days ago,
hundreds of miles and two countries separating a voice of anticipation."
The son was Jesse Palmer a University of Florida quarterback; his mother lives
in Canada. Would those two countries be Michigan and Wisconsin?
[Contributor: Bill
Weldon, Bell, FL]
[#21]
This San Jose
Mercury News writer, Patrick May, has definable talent. He should visit
your classes and describe the manner in which he develops his purple prose. The
following was in the Sunday paper (January 18, 1998):
"Shrouded
in Winder fog, trapped in the gullies of the Mother Lode, the ghosts of a
thousand mining camps toss in a fitful slumber. Down in Dead Mule Cañon, up on Chicken-Thief Flat, the pick and shovel clang
in muffled knell. A century and a half after that first golden glint caught
James Marshall's eye, after the lust and liquor scattered lost souls over every
hill and hollow, these foothills still tremble."
He continues, "The Gold Rush wsa the
largest mass migration in American history. It ws the
champagne bottle smashed over California's bow."
[Contributor: Rick
Sherman, San Jose, CA]
[#22]
I would like to
introduce you to Ms. Sally Small, the video review columnist for the San
Antonio Express-News, which is the only English-language daily paper in the
area.
Ms. Small writes in a
misspelled stream-of-consciousness style that, while probably intended to be
chatty, mostly comes off as schizophrenic. She leaps from one incoherent phrase
to the next, springing random unprovoked attacks on "liberal"
celebrities. Religious holidays are an excuse for orgies of Christian prosyletizing. She recently informed her readers that a
certain Asian actor resembled Number Two Son from the Charlie Chan movies.
Eventually, after an
entire page of this drivel, she offhandedly gets around to mentioning the video
that was the purported reason for her miserable column in the first place.
Here's the best part: The people she's attacked in her column are usually NOT
EVEN IN the video being reviewed!
I would go on, but
words fail me. I'll let the anti-writer speak for herself. I dunno, maybe YOU can figure out what the hell it is she's
trying to say.
"Initiatively
offended by this 'prudish remark,' that's what my friend of the opposite sex
wanted to shrug it off as, Al asked me to elaborate."
"At
first, 'Event Horizon' seems to be the regulated sci-fi thriller."
"But,
it's THIS ludicrous episode that calls for the smelling sauce: ..."
"If
that's not enough torture, guess who's skinny again.
Oprah. The sentimental, talk show queen willingly shares her holiday diet
secrets. Hoo, hoo, please
spare us. Excuse me, but aren't we looking at a possible Iraqi situation?"
"Sometimes,
cheesy TV writers are fortunate enough to squeeze the blood out of an egghead's
dumb mistakes."
This is the agony we must endure in San Antonio. The damned Hearst press has a
lot to answer for.
[Contributor: David
Bryant, San Antonio]
[#23]
(A little history: a
member of Copyediting-L, a list server for copy editors, submitted the
following for comment:
This opening
paragraph appeared in a news story in the Boston Globe. Does anyone else think
it sounds as if Louise Woodward handled the baby while the polygraph examiner
was interviewing her?
Louise
Woodward, who will appeal to the state's Supreme Judicial Court to dismiss her
manslaughter conviction next month, apparently contradicted her sworn testimony
about how she handled baby Matthew Eappen during an
interview with a polygraph examiner, according to a review of court records.
A number of people
suggested corrected versions. What follows is my suggestion. I'll warn you that
a number of people on the list, particularly those from Britain and New Zealand,
were terrifically offended by this offering. On the other hand, a lot of people
loved it, and a couple of them recommended I send it along to you.)
Louise
Woodward leaned back in her chair like an Eskimo sliding into in a hot tub, a
cigar clamped in her teeth like a walleye in a mousetrap. The laugh that
escaped from her throat was half purr, half growl, and as warm as San Antonio
in August, but behind those silty blue lashes her
eyes were as cold as a hospitalization insurance claim reviewer's heart. With a
murmur of silk, she crossed one leg over the other, and the needle on my
polygraph wasn't the only thing that jumped. Later on, in court, she would deny
it, but the way she kept tossing that baby from hand to hand gave it away: Ms Ice Maiden was as nervous as a nun at a nudist camp.
Smoke curled around her shoulders like a ferret. Cuban cigar
smoke. This babe wasn't kidding when she said she was friends with the
pope.
[Contributor:
Kristine Batey, Northwestern University]
[#24]
This is from a student
publication which, unfortunately, I lost. This "novel" was one of
those overwrought fantasy deals where there's an eternal struggle between the
angelic blond brother, the "Light One," and his demonic, black-haired
twin, "the Dark One." Light hair? Dark Hair?
Twins? You mean the way Arnold Schwarzenegger and
Danny De Vito are twins? This guy needed a continuity assistant big time, since
on one page, a sword would be iron, and on the next, gold. He also wrote such
gems as, "The dark trees crouched on the
barren landscape."
But the sentence that
I will take to the grave is this one: "His
priest-blessed sword was forged in the boiling feces of the Damned."
It's a classic.
[Contributor: Amy Bown, Rochester]
[#25]
Bad published
writing? My own personal accolade (?) goes to the novelization of Murder By Death, a wonderfully funny movie (with a notably good
script by Neil Simon) which was unfortunately given to some fellow named Henry
Keating to do with as he pleased. A few excerpts from the first chapter:
"Lionel
Twain, eighteenth richest man in the world--no, sorry, seventeenth: reports
have just come in of the unfortunate decease of the current No. 17, who had
triplet heirs--the seventeenth richest man in the world, flung the book
he had just finished all the way from one end of his library to the
other."
Which is what I felt
like doing to Murder By Death. If there is one
thing Strunk, White, and I agree on, it's keeping to
a single tense unless there's a damn reason not to.
"In
the viewing room at No. 22 Lionel Twain watched the three of them set out, Dick
carrying his martini bravely before him, Dora hugging her wow of a dress
closely around her--not that it was possible for it to be much closer in most
places--and Myron trotting along at the end of his leash. Inspired perhaps by
Dick's noble example, Twain rang for Benson and a
large martini, with olive."
I will give him
points for parallel structure. Not many, but a few.
"'What a godforsaken spot to get lost,' she
drawled, her cheerfulness not having been kept even at simmering point by
frequent applications of alcohol."
Um?
"Only
his clothes were not the epitome of Old China, consisting as they did of a dark
suit of conservative cut, a good thick topcoat of guaranteed antifog qualities with a solid black derby to keep the cold
from the all-important head area."
Even aside from the
puzzling question of how the derby was attached to the topcoat, this just
scares me.
Another book
presumably written on controlled substances and printed by close relatives of
the author: Simon Hawke's The Ambivalent Magician. The author places
himself into the narrative and concludes somewhat hastily (though none too
soon) with a note from his psychiatrist, stating that he has had a nervous
breakdown from the resulting existential paradoxes. I nearly had one too, but
that should be construed as no compliment. The worst cop-out ending since "Then I woke up--it had all been a horrible
dream--or HAD IT???"
[Contributor: Lindsay
Jones, Iowa City]
[#26]
This comes from a
1927 edition of The Princess and the Goblin, by George Macdonald.
"One
very wet day, when the mountain was covered with mist which was constantly
gathering itself together into rain-drops, and pouring down on the roofs of the
great old house, whence it fell in a fringe of water from the eaves all around
it, the princess could not of course go out. She got very tired, so tired that
even her toys could no longer amuse her. You would wonder at that if I had time
to describe to you one half of the toys she had. But then you wouldn't have the
toys themselves, and that makes all the difference; you can't get tired of a
thing before you have it. It was a picture, though, worth seeing--the princess
sitting in the nursery with the sky-ceiling over her head, at a great table covered
with her toys. If the artist would like to draw this, I should advise him not
to meddle with the toys. I am afraid of attempting to describe them, and I
think he had better not try to draw them. He had better not. He can do a
thousand things I can't, but I don't think he could draw those toys. No man
could better make the princess herself than he could, though-- leaning with her
back bowed into the back of the chair, her head banging down, and her hands in
her lap, very miserable as she would say herself, and not even knowing what she
would like, except to go out and get very wet, catch a particularly nice cold,
and have to go to bed and take gruel. The next moment after
you see her sitting there, her nursegoes out of the
room."
Why does this author feel
it is so important that he tell us, several times, that he is writing this
story for us to read? Do we really need to know this?
[Kate Johnston,
Sunnyvale, CA]
[#27]
I would like to
propose a new category for entertainment of the masses, College Course Catalog
Copy, and offer a real entry as an example:
127Q-128Q.
General Chemistry
Either
semester. Four credits.
Three class periods and one 3-hour laboratory period.
(Students who have passed CHEM 137 or 153 may take CHEM 128.) (Students who
have passed CHEM 122 will receive only 2 credits for CHEM 127 but 4 credits
will be used for calculating QPR scores. A student who has a very high standing
in CHEM 122 may be permitted, with the consent of the instructor, to take CHEM
128 without 127.) CHEM 127 is not open for credit to students who have passed
CHEM 129 or 137 or 153; and CHEM 128 is not open to students who have passed
CHEM 130 or 138 or 154.
This
course is designed to provide a foundation for more advanced courses in
chemistry. The topics covered include the atomic theory, the laws and theories
concerning the physical and chemical behavior of gases, liquids, solids, and
solutions. The properties of some of the more familiar elements and their
compounds are discussed. The laboratory work in the first semester involves
quantitative measurements illustrating the laws of chemical combination
. In the second semester particular attention is given to equilibrium in
solutions and to the qualitative reactions of the common cations
and anions.
May this inspire the
creative juices of more curriculum committees.
[Contributor: Dr.
Thomas R. Burkholder, Department of Chemistry, Central Connecticut State
University]
[#28]
From
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy.
The heroine is in trouble:
"Oh,
think! think! think! of what she should do."
"Wait!
wait! wait! how long?"
"No!
No! No! No! Oh, God in heaven! this cannot be!"
All sentences occur
within two pages.
Despite her inability
to articulate extreme fear, Baroness Orczy remains a shining example of what
you can accomplish with a self-indulgent, overwritten prose style -- but a
great plot.
[Contributor: Lee
Clinch, San Francisco]
[#29]
I can't claim
responsibility for discovering this sentence; I merely found it on a web site
of a fan of the author, and have not had the opportunity to see the book.
However, this particular sentence so closely resembled a Bulwer-Lytton contest
entry that I felt an obligation to warn Dr. Rice of this author's existence,
lest anyone should attempt to submit this sentence - or another from this
author's works - as his own.
For it
must be remembered that at the time I knew quite nothing, naturally, concerning
Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney-talking Englishman with the checkered
long-beaked Sherlockholmsian cap; nor of the latter's
"Barr-Bag" which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wienerwurst
is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with
her four legs and her six arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, ex-convict, and son of
Dong Chang; nor of the elusive poetess, Abigail Sprigge;
nor of the Great Simon, with his 2163 pearl buttons; nor of--in short, I then
knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved in the affair of which I
had now become a part, unless perchance it were my Nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwümpel--or Suing Sophie!
from Riddle of the Traveling Skull in 1934 by
Harry Stephen Keeler.
[Contributor: John Savard, Edmonton]
[#30]
Here's one for ya! From the Harlequin Superromance
Nobody Does it Better by Jan Freed
The hero and heroine are trying to escape a hit man as
they climb up the side of a mountain, and this sentence occurs (page 247):
"She
stuck to his prime-grade A tush
like shrink-wrap to a rump roast."
[Contributor: Shannon
Walker, Belmont, CA]
[#31]
I came across a good
one in the Southern Reporter (Scottish Borders local paper).
"Prince
Charles will be paying a surprise visit to the Borders next month."
Some surprise now--especially as it went on to give details of his 2
engagements!
-- [Contributor:
Damian Sharp, Scotland]
[#32]
Inspired by this site
about appalling excuses for literature, I went and dug out the cheesiest horror
novel I could find in the hope of discovering some humerous
literary blunders. Class Trip, by the curiously-named author Bebe Faas Rice, yeilded two examples of note:
"Knowing
Christabel..., it was obvious that she had mixed up
somehow in James's emotional breakdown. If she hadn't been, she would have had
no problem airing James's dirty laundry."
Curious.
Apparently, James's emotional state is linked to the cleanliness of his
clothing. Take note also of this little gem:
"Ron
was acting like an entirely different person from the one I was used to seeing
at school. Christabel's put-downs were getting to him, cutting him off at the knees and
leaving him off balance and uncertain."
Well, I'm no expert,
but I imagine cutting someone's legs off below the knees leaves them slightly
more than off balance.
[Contributor: Philip
Alderman, U.K.]
[#33]
"To
understand why the house makes so much money at the craps table, you first have
to understand why."--Roger Gros, How to Win at Casino Gambling, Carlton Books
(1996) p.74
I realise
this doesn't qualify as literature (even bad literature) but I think it is
important to recognise contributions to the bleeding
obvious from all types of writing.
[Contributor: Stephen
Hart, Sydney, Australia]
[#34]
After reading the
examples of bad prose now being listed, I chanced upon the following passage in
a horror novel entitled The Night Seasons by J. N. Williamson, who is
touted on the cover as a grandmaster of horror. I'm unfamiliar with this
fellow's work, but this is truly scary writing:
"With
a cockeyed sense of elation and drunken mission, I stumbled down the apartment
steps and lurched out of the front door of the building. Perspiration clouded
my vision along with alcohol, and the slanting parking space lines in the
parking lot were making me dizzy. I located my '79 Omni (so undesirable it
could be safely left anywhere - nobody even seemed to want its parts) in the
late-night darkness that was like thick, malefic, homemade jelly."
Every sentence is
richly deserving of comment. First, what is a "cockeyed sense of
elation?" The second sentence makes it sound as though perspiration is
clouding the alcohol, and includes the acutely inept phrase "parking space
lines in the parking lot." The parenthetical observations about the '79
Omni are add nothing to the picture and are redundant. And
finally, my favorite, "malefic, homemade jelly." Is that
Satan's family recipe?
[Contributor: Rick
Gilbert, Lexington, MA]
[#35]
"We
stopped for a light and I saw a young woman give her ration book to a woman who
wore a flowered housedress in exchange for a ten-dollar bill."
--Gloria Goldreich, That Year of Our War
(1994) p. 46
Was ten dollars the price of the housedress? That's
fairly expensive for the 1940s. Did someone pay the young woman ten dollars to
wear the dress? If so, why? I had quite a chuckle at
Ms. Goldreich's expense and, for the next couple of
weeks after reading it, shared this quotation with anyone who would listen.
[Contributor: Joyce Gero Truro, Nova Scotia, Canada]
[#36]
In my continuing
search for bad writing, my attention fell upon that bastion of children's
literature, Enid Blyton. I'm easily amused.
She
tucked the little thing under her fur coat and only its quaint little pointed
nose looked out. The four children, watching from the window of the
waiting-room, thought it was a little dear!
-- The Mystery of Tally-Ho Cottage, By Enid Blyton
Since when did you
describe a dog's nose as "quaint"? Note also that the children are
convinced that the dog is expensive ("dear").
The
new-comers made such a stir and commotion that the four children came out of
the waiting-room to watch. Everyone was very hilarious.
Everyone was very
hilarious?? Unusual turn of phrase, Mrs. Blyton.
Using similar methodology, you could describe a tree as being Very Growing, or
a car as being Very Moving. I'm not sure whether this counts
as bad writing or just poor proof-reading, but it caught my attention.
Nyssa touched
Tegan on the shoulder and said quietly:'Tegan ...I don't know what's happening to the Doctor - none
of us understands it. But I do know that panicking is no use.' Nyssa touched Tegan on the shoulder and said quietly:'Tegan
...I don't know what's happening to the Doctor - none of us understands it. But
I do know that panicking is no use.'
--Doctor Who - Castrovalva, by Christopher H. Bidmead
Hmm. 'Nuff said.
[Contributor: Philip
Alderman, Luton, the UK]
[#37]
I thought you might
appreciate this for the "Sticks and Stones" page. From The Lion in
the Valley: An Amelia Peabody Mystery by Elizabeth Peters (1986):
"The
blood that had abandoned her countenance rushed into his."
A very interesting
transfusion, at any rate!
[Contributor: Laura
Sauer, Vernon, CT]
[#38]
Some true literary
atrocities have been committed by nature writers. Here's a particularly
horrible example from Hummingbirds of North America: Attracting, Feeding,
and Photographing Them, by former TV weatherman
Dan True (author of What Do Women Want from Men?), published in 1993 by
University of New Mexico Press:
"Since
then I have learned of a very good but very expensive commercial hummingbird
mix for sick hummingbirds from Germany used by the San Diego zoo called Necton."
It's a pity that most
of the book is at least marginally more readable than this, because there are
more scientific inaccuracies in this one slim volume than in the last 20 years worth of books on hummingbirds. Though True makes
many mistakes of his own, a substantial number of errors lie in extensive
passages quoted from outdated sources. Maps of hummingbird distribution bear
suspicious resemblances to those a fairly recent, reputable work (with their
original captions largely intact, though nonsensical in their new context). One
of the most astonishing parts of this work is its bibliography, specifically
this self-referential citation:
True,
D. 1993. A history of hummingbird feeders.
Hummingbirds of North America: Attracting, Feeding, and Photographing Them.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Such a monstrosity
cannot be the work of just one man; only through spectacular editorial
incompetence could this work achieve such depths. One has to hope that the
editor wasn't a product of the University of New Mexico's English Department.
[Contributor: Sheri
Williamson, Bisbee, Arizona]
[#39]
Larissa MacFarquhar launches her interview with Nicolas Cage in
"Stranger in Paradise" in Premiere Magazine (June 1997) with:
"Three
little wrinkles like a stack of tiny pancakes sit just at the top of Nicolas
Cage's nose, held in place by his bushy, Italian-guy eyebrows, which extend out
and down like two hairy arms around his for-the-moment strangely vacant blue
eyes."
[Contributor: Name
withheld, San Francisco]
[#40]
You want bad writing
- I got bad writing. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you. Star Trek-- First
Frontier by Diane Carey and Dr James I Kirkland.
Doctor Kirkland is credited as the dinosaur expert, since the story is set on
prehistoric earth. I hesitate to guess what Ms
Carey's field of expertise may be, since it certainly isn't writing clear,
literate English prose. The book is littered with cherishable
errors - at a rate of one or two biggies every four or five pages. Particular favourites include a resolute refusal to use the phrase
"He (or she) said" if at all possible. So we have:
Kirk
clipped, Chekov bolted. (While not moving from his seat), he malaised, Kirk distilled....., he resigned (While
not going anywhere) Kirk impugned.
Though see Chapter 29
(below) for my all time favourite.
Chapter 23 starts
with the entirely incomprehensible sentence: "Head
down into the storm they went, pressing barehanded to their chests an
unshielded sense of peril."
There are so many
pleasing subjects for speculation here. How does a group of humanoids have
multiple chests but only one head? Do you sometimes need gloves to press
unshielded senses of peril to your chest? Do senses of perils usually come
shielded and they took the shield off, or did they put a shield on and then
took it off afterwards? And if so, why?
But all these pale
into insignificance before the panoply of riches which is Chapter 29.
We have a Klingon who
"gazed up at Kirk with roguish languor."
A dinosaur described
as a "shriven corpse on the floor." As
I Catholic, I find it curiously reassuring to know that Confession was
available to prehistoric reptiles. A human is endowed with a twenty-foot arm. (apparently only the one, though) and the best of the
"he said" alternatives.
"Pushing,
Kirk under-girded, "But........"
And I haven't even
mentioned the rest of the book : Kirk leering at the bridge screen, the seconds
that went by like surgical time (faster? slower?) the chap who cloyed to his
work, Kirk reeling with respect for someone, disinterest used for uninterest, Kirk's surfeiting nod, vilification used as a
synonym for hatred, and disdained for despised.
BTW What happened to
the sarky comments on The Eye of Argon? They
were the best bits.
[Contributor: C
Carter, North Yorkshire, England]
[#41]
Sacrifice of Isaac,
by Neil Gordon (Bantam Books)
Although I managed to
finish this 300+ page novel, the whole thing was written so awkwardly that I
just felt compelled to highlight some of the more glaring examples:
"She
wore a sleeveless black leotard that showed shoulders sloping from a fine, long
neck; small, round breasts; a firm stomach above womanly - not girlish -
hips."
After telling us her
hips are womanly, do we really need to be told they aren't girlish?
"The
walls were covered with glass cases of the the sort
that might have housed a lawyer's Napoleonic Code in a story by Balzac but that
showcased, instead, a variety of small objects; a polyurethane-cased page of
illuminated manuscript, an alabaster swallow, a copper kohl vial on which Luke
recognized the fluid curves of Arabic script."
Who cares what they
MIGHT have housed?! "This time he answered in heavily-accented English. 'Business, my dear.'"
Then in French again, as if she were an old friend: "Like Count
Mippipopolous? With his arrow
wounds?" It happened that she had read The Sun Also Rises
and remembered the count well."
Good for her, what
about us? Please, this literary name-dropping ("Gee, he's read Balzac AND
Hemingway") is irritating instead of impressive . . . And shouldn't
"count" have a capital "C"?
"Later,
the sun rising to noon height, another reality - the yang of Nicole's yin -
introduced itself."
Huh?
"Nor,
she thought, could they see the very Benami-esque
courage they carried into their strange rebellions."
Call me a wet blanket,
but something about turning a surname into an adjective just seems pretentious
. . .
[Contributor: S.
Pearson, S. Korea]
[#42]
I present the
following, even though it is not technically published writing, on the grounds
that it may well explain some of the other contributions to "Sticks &
Stones." It comes from a rejection letter I received recently from a
literary agent, Core Creations, LLC.
"Though
potentially marketable, due to fierce competition not enough of us here were
enthusiastic about your material to validate an offer of representation at this
time. If you write something else, feel free to consider us again."
Of course, it has the
merit of being the only rejection letter I've ever received that made me feel
as if I'd just dodged a bullet. Like everyone else who reads, however, I must
sleep at night knowing that there is apparently a potential market for people
who write like nitwits, and their job is screening manuscripts. Or validating
offers of representation, whatever that means.
[Contributor: Doris Dungey, Des Moines, IA]
[#43]
This isn't nice. The
guy who used to run the parking lot at the newspaper where I work had a book
published in 1984 by a vanity press. The title was catchy: 'Beg Before You Die.' It was a Mickey Spillane-tough-detective
genre book, set somewhere in the southwest. It got off to a really bad start,
though, with an opening paragraph that left you wondering what was going on:
''It
was a long hot drive this afternoon, I was telling Kay, who was sitting with
her back against the right front door, her nicely tanned left leg under her;
the back of her right knee was swinging back and forth off her instep, keeping
a sort of tempo with the soft music that was coming over the car radio.''
He goes off his
narrative halfway through the first sentence, getting tangled in the
contortions of Kay, the pretzel lady, and finishing with a desperate appeal to
the reader: Look! This car has a radio!
By page 10, the
protagonist and Kay have pulled into a drive-in to eat. Among other features
perfectly irrelevant to the story is the presence of a Mexican-American carhop.
After eating ( '' 'The chicken is delicious,' I said.'') Kay
changes out of shorts and into a dress in the back seat of the car. Although it
has nothing to do with story or character, the author evidently felt that what
happened next was a roaringly funny scene and had to
be included:
''The
carhop came over to the car and asked if we would care for anything else. '' 'No thanks!' ''Then it dawned on her. The first two trips
the girl had made to the car, Kay had been in the shorts and halter and now she
was fully dressed. She must have thought she had drunk too much tequila.''
[Contributor: Dave
Matheny, Ramsey, Minnesota]
[#44]
Edgar Rice Burroughs
is a natural Bulwer-Lyttonian. The opening sentence
to Synthetic Men of Mars seems to me a close stylistic match to our
hero's archetypical evocation of nocturnal tempestuousness by virtue of the
hydrological subject matter and the curious blending of the melodramatic and
the quotidian.
From Phundahl at their western extremity, east to Toonol, the Great Toonolian
Marshes stretch across the dying planet for eighteen hundred earth miles like
some unclean, venomous, Gargantuan reptile - an oozy marshland through which
wind narrow watercourses connecting occasional bodies of open water, little
lakes, the largest of which covers but a few acres.
[Contributor: Lew Mammel, Jr., Wheaton, Illinois]
[#45]
Generally, if I don't
like a book I stop reading it. Doom: Hell On Earth by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver, however, was an exception. I work in the
computer game industry, and since this is a novelization of a computer game,
someone thought I wanted it. I did in a way. It's the most consistently bad
piece of writing I've ever encountered.
There are too many
examples to quote--you could pretty much include the entire book. This one is a
favorite, though:
"The
truck stuck close to our bumper through the totally porous checkpoint. After
that, we just drove in typical L.A. style, weaving drunkenly between
zombie-driven trucks, leaning on our horn, all the time heading for the ever
popular LAX. I wanted to give the airport the biggest laxitive
it had ever had with Lemon Marine Suppositories. Cleans out
those unsightly monsters every time!"
One wonders how often
the staff at LAX gives the airport a laxitive to make
the planes take off more smoothly. And why the Marine Suppositories are
flavored.
[Contributor: Steve
Honeywell, De Kalb, IL]
[#46]
Colin
Dexter, The Secret of Annexe 3 (one of the
Inspector Morse novels).
"Soon
the two friends were seated facing each other in the lounge bar, the surgeon
resting his heavy-looking dolichocephalic skull upon his left hand."
"But
these minor worries could hardly compare with the consternation caused on the
Monopoly front by a swift-fingered checker-out from a Bedford supermarket whose
palm was so extraordinarily speedy in the recovery of the two dice thrown from
the cylindrical cup that her opponents had little option but to accept, without
ever seeing the slightest evidence, her instantaneously enunciated score, and
then to watch helplessly as this sharp-faced woman moved her little counter
along the board to whichever square seemed of the greatest potential profit to
her entrepeneurial designs."
"She
could recall, quite certainly, clearing away after the soup course; picking up
the supernumary spoons and forks that marked the
place of that pusillanimous spirit from Solihull,
Doris Arkwright; standing by in the kitchen as a Pork Normandy had slithered off
its plate to the floor, to be replaced thither after a perfunctory wipe;
drinking a third cocktail; dancing with the Lord High Executioner; eating two
helpings of the gateau in the kitchen; dancing, in the dim light of the
ballroom, a sort of chiaroscuro cha-cha-cha with the mysterious 'Rastafarian' -
the latter having been adjudged the winner of the men's fancy-dress prize;
telling Binyon not to be so silly when he'd broached
the proposition of a brief dive beneath the duvet in her temporary quarters; drinking
a fourth cocktail, the colour of which she could no
longer recall; feeling slightly sick; walking up the stairs to her bedroom
before the singing of 'Auld Lang Syne'; feeling very
sick; and finally finding herself in bed.
I think these sum up the faults of Dexter's writing: inappropriately
complex words, archaicisms and over-long sentences.
Dexter - via Morse - often pushes on the reader his prescriptive views on
grammar and spelling, and seems to come from the school of writing that views
pomposity as clever and stylish.
[Contributor: Ray
Girvan, Topsham, Devon, UK]
[#47]
Do you accept bad
sentences from non-fiction books? Here are two from The University in Ruins,
by Bill Readings, 1996:
"Hence,
Shakespeare, not the Greeks, is positioned by the English as the prelapsarian moment of a spontaneous immediate organic
culture that the nation-state must seek to regain by means of the rational
mediation of University education."
"First
of all, the British proletariat is not the product of a theorization of the
effects of industrial society by a Communist Party, is not born like Athena
from the head of Zeus with the Communist Party as midwife."
An awkward and an
unlearned simile: Athena's midwife was Hephaestus, who brought her into the
world by taking an axe to Zeus' skull. If Readings had completed the simile, he
might have a clue to why the English workers have chosen to disappoint Marx's
plans for them.
[Contributor: Mark
O'Bannon, New Orleans]
[#48]
Here's something
short and terrible that you may like to consider for the Sticks and Stones
section:
"He
looked at me with his bottomless-cup-of-coffee eyes." Pg.
154 (hardcover edition) The Flower Master by Sujata
Massey.
[Contributor:
Scarlett Pearson]
[#49]
While researching a
biology project, I began leafing through a science library periodical
collection. Therein, I found a few volumes of a nineteenth century public
health journal, Sanitarian, one of which housed a very insightful
article on the prevention of constipation, written by a physician whose name I
don't recall. It's probably better that way, considering the degree to which he
waxed romantic at the end. I enclose his final paragraph for your edification
and entertainment.
"And
on the field of battle which preventive medicine is now and everywhere waging
against the ills to which flesh is heir, the banner of preventive constipation
is well at the front. Indeed I feel confident and I do greatly rejoice in this
assurance, that when the enthusiastic physician who is ever loyal to the guild,
who keeps her escutcheon fair and stainless, who is ever jealous of her honor,
shall proudly make mention of her achievements and will not then be
omitted."
American Practitioner and News, August 13th, 1892
Keep in mind, this
writer is discussing constipation. All the flowery words in the world won't
change that, no matter what he may think.
[Contributor: Bronwyn
Foley, Middletown, CT]
[#50]
When I read this sentence I immediately thought of the "Sticks and
Stones" portion of your Bulwer-Lytton website:
With
listeners leaning over the velvet restraining ropes and angling for pictures,
John Glenn urged them to remember Shepard's 1961 Redstone flight in its
political context, when the Soviet Union was seducing world opinion with the
lingerie of Earth-orbiting technology.
-- Billy Cox, "Shepard Statue Honors American Space Cowboys," Florida
Today, March 24, 2000.
Sputnik
lingerie? Kinky!
[Contributor: L. Lohrli-Kirk, Costa Mesa, CA]
[#51]
How about this
passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder Book For Girls
And Boys as an example of conciseness and accuracy in writing?
"I
can hardly tell how many of these small people there were; not less than nine
or ten, however no more than a dozen of all sorts, sizes, and ages, whether
girls or boys."
Yet after saying
this, Hawthorne goes on to name the unspecified number of children with exactly
twelve names. So, first there might be nine children; then there might be ten;
but there were certainly no more than twelve -- until finally, he breaks down
and gives us their twelve names; and these names, he goes on to tell us, are
not their real names, etc., etc. Hawthorne then rambles on at great length
about the imaginary names of his unnumbered children for several hundred words
-- and all of this in the six page "Introductory"
to THE GORGON'S HEAD. Let's say what we mean, and mean what we say, Nate! And
let's pick up the pace a little -- and I don't mean pecante
sauce!
[Contributor: Steven
M. Ruppert, Colorado Springs, CO]
[#52]
This comes from
Elizabeth Peters' Crocodile on the Sandbank, a mystery set in Egypt in
the late 1880's. Our protagonist has woken from a troubled sleep to discover a
hooded cobra on the foot of her bed.
"With
a desparate effort I wrenched my eyes from the
hypnotic glare of the snake. I rolled them toward the door. I dared move no
further."
She is saved when the
hero shoots the snake. No mention of how she retrieved her eyes.
[Contributor: Liz
Henderson, Durham, NC]
[#53]
I nominate All
Through the Night by Mary Higgins Clark as an example of one of the worst
pieces of fiction ever published. It is worthy of mention in "Sticks &
Stones." The characterization is two-dimensional (at best), the dialogue
is laughable, and the novel is one cliche after
another. The only redeeming factor about the novel is that it should give
aspiring writers hope, because if this novel can make it into print and even
make it to the New York Times best-seller's list, anything can! The following
passage is my favorite example of the cliches that
fill the book:
Tracy
tossed his slim folder on Lenny Centino back on the
desk. "Well, now that he's back, I'm going to keep my eye on him. If I see
him with that little girl, I may just bring him in. He'll make a mistake
eventually, and when he does, I intend to be there."
[Contributor: Robert
Villanueva, Radcliff, KY]
[#54]
This gem is from
Barbara Taylor Bradford´s Voice of the Heart: 771 pages of sludge-like
purple prose:
An
ineffable tranquility hovered over the villa, was broken only occasionally by
the intermittent sounds of the staff going about their duties: the whirr of the
vacuum, the faint birdlike chirpings of the maids as they dusted adjacent
rooms, the echo of the butler´s brisk tones issuing orders, the click of a door
closing, the patter of distant busy feet. Gradually these individual noises
were beginning to merge, flowed together to create a vague and muffled hum that
hardly intruded at all on her gentle peregrinations through the labyrinth of
her mind.
[Contributor: Nicole Simard, Bramalea, Ontario]
[#55]
Here's another entry
for the "Sticks & Stones" section which may or may not be
interesting. From the mystery thriller The Plague Stone by Gillian
White. Not a bad read, but her similes are wretched:
Pg. 81: "Marian's strained face beamed rays of anxiety like
a sickly sun"
Pg. 82: "She wanted to pick her heart up like a naughty
toddler and take it outside and smack it until it stopped leaping about like
this"
I'd like to pick the
author up like a naughty child and do the same . . .
Pg
89, referring to the town hall: "Today it was
in its starkest state . . . naked and waiting like a woman with wet hair
sitting dull and expectant before the stylist"
[Contributor:
Scarlett Pearson, Montreal, Quebec]
[#56]
I was reading the
technical manual for a camera mount and found this little gem. Presumably the
translator got paid for the work. The system is installed and works beautifully
in spite of my inability to follow instructions.
"If
don't mount on the pan/tilt head, provide the mounting screws in speciality for it. Select the mounting screws with taking
into consideration." Panasonic
[Contributor: David Yeamans, Los Alamos, New Mexico]
[#57]
Ah, come on. You
people have no idea. :-) The all-time worst piece of fiction ever
published is Vampire Beat by Vincent Courtney. You can literally pick a
page at random and find something to howl at. I'll demonstrate, but first I
have to warm you up with the book's opening:
"The
knife was poised above her heart. Her screams cut through the dead, rotten air
of the warehouse. Batiste Legendre smiled. He bent down and soul-kissed the
terrified eighteen-year-old who was to remain that age forever."
Okay, literally at
random here:
Page 134: "The Happy Christian bookshop was a quaint little
place that catered to the born-again faction of the community."
(Funny, with a name like that I'd have thought they were aiming at the Muslim
market.) "Religious artifacts and books cluttered the shelves." (So
*that's* where I put that Shroud of Turin! Always the last place you look.)
"The store had a rosy cinammon smell from the
potpourri of cinnamon and rose petals in a wicker
basket that hung from the ceiling." (You don't say...how odd.)
Page 186: "Fear grabbed her by the throat. It was the car, the
green sedan, the same one which had taken her on her nightmare journey the
night before!" (Ah, thanks for reminding us about that nightmare
journey--otherwise it might have slipped our minds while we were busy wondering
what's gotten into Fear lately. And for cluing us in to the fact that sedans are a type of car.)
Same page: "It was as though she was trying to slog through mud
that was up to her shins--thick, clinging mud that sapped the life out of her
legs. Behind her she could hear the raspy breathing of her pursuer. 'Come on,
baby, the master is waiting. He wants to hold you,' he wheezed. 'He wants to
kiss you. He wants to drink all your blood!'"(Well. The only
comment I can offer is, 'When there's life-sapping metaphorical mud to contend
with, who worries about vampires?')
Page 98: "He had a haunted look about him, as though he had a
horrible secret he was trying to conceal." (Trying, but obviously
not succeeding. This in reference to the vampire character, of course.) "Brown froze the smile on Carver's face with his
steely glare." (He could have used his icy glare instead, but
decided that would be too obvious.)
I'm not making this
up. I would also gladly nominate Vampire Beat for a Worst Cover Art Ever
contest, if such a thing ever comes into being . . .
[Contributor: Sarah
Roark, Redmond, WA]
[#58]
"Maximus
wheeled his horse at the end of the stadium and started back toward two
chariots bearing down on him in staggered formation. They sped toward each
other much like Medieval jousters."
From Gladiator, by Dewey Gram, Onyx Books.
Beam him aboard,
Scotty. Maximus is caught in a time warp.
[Contributor: Mary
Ann Unger, New Jersey]
[#59]
You literary sorts
have no idea what burdens we newspaper writers have to bear. This is the lead
paragraph from a press release from Fort Hood, our nation's largest military
installation.
MEMORANDUM FOR
CORRESPONDENTS: ARMY DEVELOPS APPLICATION FOR WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT COALITION
June 14, 2000
The U.
S. Army announced today the Program Manager (PM), Joint Computer-aided
Acquisition and Logistics Support (JCALS), as a member of the Workflow
Management Coalition (WfMC), has developed an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) application specification
(www.aiim.org/wfmc/) to facilitate workflow interoperability. In addition to
having served as coordinators and editors of the new Wf-XML
specification for the WfMC, PM JCALS is developing
one of the first production implementations of Wf-XML
for a US Army Communications-Electronics Command customer. Several integration
efforts already underway within JCALS plan to use the Wf-XML
standard to interface with remote workflow engines, as well as be the basis for
future workflow integration efforts.
[Contributor: J.B.
Smith, Waco Tribune-Herald, Waco, Texas]
[#60]
The first two are
really examples of bad proofreading rather than bad writing; the third will be
somewhat controversial.
1) In the novel Star
Trek: Klingon, on page 71, Commander Riker asks Captain Picard, who has
just put the ship on Red Alert until further notice: "Percussion only. Or
do you expect trouble?"
Now, ignoring the
fact that it should be a question mark rather than a period between the two
sentences, somebody obviously ran a badly-spelled attempt at
"Precaution" through a spell-checker, and took the suggestion,
"Percussion."
My girlfriend
suggests that it's a shame that they didn't further err by changing
"trouble" to "treble."
2) This is a letter
to the editor that appeared in the St. Louis Post Dispatch some years
ago, as its subject matter (the book"The
Bell Curve, by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein) would indicate. Now,
I'm not slamming the writer of the letter; he is (presumably, hopefully) not
someone who makes his living by writing. I am, however, slamming whoever was
responsible for proofreading and editing the letters page; normally, letters to
the editor do not get printed verbatim, at least, not if they need editing as
badly as this one did:
"The
book, The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, is a
faulty continuation of a myth. I'm surprised such a study can be taken so
seriously.
"Murray
and Herrnstein's first mistake is reliance on IQ tests. Haven't we explored
this fallacy thoroughly enough? IQ tests are not scientific and have little
value in judging intelligence. The creator of the IQ test, German psychologist
W. Stern, wrote in his introduction that these tests should not be given to
black children. Stern obviously knew what Murray and Herrnstein never admit --
IQ tests are written for white children and adults because environment plays
such an important equation.
"The
second mistake and perhaps the most injurious one by the Murray-Herrnstein team
is that the difference in IQ is genetic. Since when are these two certified as
geneticists? What could they possibly know about genetics except the flawed
finding of researchers who fit their mode of thinking? Genetics is still a new
science. Down syndrome and the defective gene for dyslexia have just recently
been explored.Genetics has a long way to go before it
can tell us anything about intelligence or the lack thereof between blacks and
whites.
If, as
Murray and Herrnstein assert, most Americans are between the middle range IQ, then what is the point? And if it's genetic, why are there whites who can't even read the theory Murray and
Herrnstein have written. Murray readily admits that the purpose of the book is
to justify the elimination of welfare and affirmative action programs because
the low IQs of blacks is in their genes and therefore can never be altered to
justify the expensive of such social programs. We all need to dismiss and
destroy this inauspicious theory, which will injure so many who are not capable
of understanding its implications. 'The Bell Curve' is 850 pages of sloppy
research. Any study that would not appropriate environment as a factor in
intelligence should be repudiated on its very face."
Ow.
My brain hurts. I'd go into detail as to what was wrong with that, but I don't
care to spend more than another hour or so. 3) Lolita, by Vladimir
Nabokov. Many people seem to feel that his language is gorgeous and evocative;
I just found it badly overdone. Obviously, I can't quote ALL the Bulwer-Lyttonesqe passages from the book, so what I'm going to do
is this: I'm going to RANDOMLY flip it open to a pair of pages, and scan. I
guarantee that I can find a paragraph that would be competitive in the BLFC.
pp.60-61:
"Immediately afterward (as if we had been
struggling and now my grip had eased) she rolled off the sofa and jumped to her
feet -- to her foot, rather -- in order to attend to the formidably loud
telephone that may have been ringing for ages as far as I was concerned. There
she stood and blinked, cheeks aflame, hair awry, her eyes passing over me
lightly as they did over the furniture, and as she listened or spoke (to her
mother who was telling her to come to lunch with her at the Chatfields
-- neither Lo nor Hum knew yet what busybody Haze was plotting), she kept
tapping the edge of the table with the slipper she held in her hand."
Seek on any random
pair of pages in the book, and you'll find an equally convoluted and Bulwer-Lyttonesque sentence or two.
[Contributor: Jim Yanni, St. Louis, MO]
[#61]
This is a rather
obscure reference; the book is a sci-fi pulp novel that is (doubtless long) out
of print, titled Assassins From Tomorrow, by
Peter Heath. The story is a tale of how president
Kennedy was actually assassinated by time travelers (at least, that's what the
dust-jacket says; I'm 83 pages in out of a total of 160, and I've seen very
little hint of this) and it is, in general, about as bad as you might expect.
But ignoring, for the moment, the fact that the plot is silly, the characters
one-dimensional, and the writing style about what one would expect in a pulp
written in 1967. there have been a couple of notable
errors:
on
page 81, the main character is erecting a gadget that will help to save the
day, and we are faced with this passage:
"The
noon sun was starting to blister the back of his neck before the last
connection was soldered. All that remained was to connect the four large
aircraft batteries to the terminals of the transmitter and reciever.
That could wait until later. The next thing to do was to set up the dish
antenna . . ."
If "all that
remained" was (A), then presumably, the next thing to do should not be
(B). Then, on page 83, a shark is being shot. ".
. . soon, more bullets were chewing into the hides of the killer fish."
They may have been
chewing into the shark's SIDES, or its HIDE. But
unless I'm very mistaken, most sharks only have one HIDE.
[Contributor: Jim Yanni, St. Louis, MO]
[#62]
This is from the
advance reading copy of Ladies with Options, by Cynthia Hartwick, to be published in February 2001.
"Agnes
liked her job too much and carried it with her. She was like a human LEGO
display--loveable but provoking."
A true gem, I'm sure,
if we could ever figure out what was loveable or provoking about a display of
plastic toy building blocks.
[Contributor: Lisa,
Rialto, California]
[#63]
About ten years ago I
bought a copy of The Gate to Women's Country by Sherri S. Tepper to while away the time on a two-hour ferry ride. I
read the first few pages and after recovering from my laughter I spent the rest
of the ride walking out on the decks. I don't know if the book itself is any
good, I've never been able to get past the beginning. Here is the opening
paragraph.
"Stavia saw herself as in a picture, from the outside, a
darkly cloaked figure moving along a cobbled street, the stones sheened with a
soft early spring rain. On either side the gutters ran with an infant chuckle
and gurgle, baby streams being amused with themselves.
The corniced buildings smiled candlelit windows across at one another, their
shoulders huddled protectively inward - though not enough to keep the rain from
streaking the windows and making the candlelight seem the least bit weepy, a
luxurious weepiness, as after a two-hanky drama of love lost or
unrequited."
I could comment on
every sentence but I'll keep it short. How can the candlelight be the least bit
weepy and luxuriously weepy at the same time. And if
you need to use a second hanky because the first is too wet then you ain't weeping, you're crying your eyes out.
This prose goes on as
far as I have gotten into the book but I'll only add the third paragraph here.
"Stavia the observer noted particularly the quality of the
light. Dusk. Gray of cloud and
shadowed green of leaf. It was apt, this light -- well done for the mood
of the piece. Nostalgic. Melancholy
without being utterly depressing. A few crepuscular rays broke through
the western cloud cover in long, mysterious beams, as though they were
searchlights from a celestial realm, seeking a lost angel perhaps or some
escaped soul from Hades trying desperately to find the road to heaven. Or
perhaps they were casting about to find a fishing boat, out there on the
darkling sea, though she could not immediately think of a reason that the
heavenly ones should need a fishing boat."
[Contribitor:
Ray Dornan, Langley, B.C., Canada]
[#64]
"All
who knew Yas, knew Yas was freakin'."
"You could run around in Angel Hair socks for months without getting holes
in them."
"People doubted."
By
Ron Bracle, Beyond the Known.
Yes, Yas is one pretty freakin'
guy, people doubted, and angel hair socks. Now that makes sense. If you turn to
just about any page in the book you will find sentences just like these. In
fact, I have only found two sentences that made any sense at all in the whole
book.
[Contributor: A.
McCollum, Ohio]
[#65]
Two more examples of
competition-class Bulwer-Lyttony, cunningly
impenetrable prose from The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics
by Cambridge political theorist John Dunn:
"For
most of the last two hundred years, it has been natural (and perhaps
reasonable) to suppose that the root of these disagreements lies in a conflict
of intuition about the imaginative and material basis of political
authorization, on what (if anything) could rationally entitle some humans to
command others so decisively, and what might imaginatively impel the latter to
concede that this was reasonable."
This passage could be
replaced with a simple declarative sentence: "Politics involves deciding
who is in charge."
"The
modern republic is a passive local implementation device of a global and
utterly humanly uncontrollable collective madness. It sustains a façade of
local (and human) control, and by doing so facilitates and reinforces the
profound corruption of human purpose which has always lent such force to the
market, and which by now has fashioned a world in which almost anything is
openly for sale." Huh?
[Contributor: Michael
P. Morley, Akron, Ohio]
[#66]
From
Triangle by Irene Pence. True
crime book about a man who killed his girlfriend's lesbian lover and stuffed
the body into a 3' high barrel. After shooting the woman and shoving her
body into the container, he left his house, but "The
woman would not let him forget her. Soon she would call to him with an acrid
aroma he couldn't ignore."
Irene has a thing
about eyes. While a detective is preparing to open the barrel, "All eyes were on the barrel, and all of those eyes
were large." Later, in court, "The family kept their eyes on
the witness, but most of those eyes were moist." Another hostile witness
had ". . . short hair, but today his temper was shorter."
This book was so bad,
the only thing that kept me reading was the fun I was having highlighting
horrid writing.
[Contributor: Carina
MacDonald, Denver, Colorado]
[#67]
Quite why P. D. James
- the English crime writer - has attained such a reputation, I shall never
know. Every page of every novel presents examples of ill-considered, pompous
and tortuous prose. Let us open A Taste for Death at random:
Whatever
the time of year, except in the worst of winter weather, this was her nightly
routine. She would pour herself a whisky, Bell's, and take out the glass for
these minutes of contemplation, rather, she thought, like a caged prisoner
reassuring herself that the city was still there. But her small flat was no
prison . . .
Let us consider this
for a few moments.
Why should she fail
to pour herself a whisky 'in the worst of the winter weather'? Would not
adverse climatic conditions be exactly those under which any sensible person
would adhere most eagerly to this routine?
Why should she 'pour
herself a whisky' and then 'take out the glass'? Where has she poured the
whisky? Down the kitchen sink? Over
her shoes? Most of us, I daresay, would take out the glass before
pouring the whisky.
How many caged
prisoners - as opposed, I guess, to uncaged and
wholly at liberty prisoners - pour themselves a short
at bedtime? Given that the 'she' here is a police officer, the reader ought to
expect a slightly greater degree of awareness in respect of the conditions of
incarceration.
Why should a 'caged
prisoner' wish to reassure herself/himself 'that the city was still there'?
Where else would it be? Gone to Miami for a fortnight's break? Would 'a caged
prisoner' be distressed or elated at the sudden and unexplained absence of a
city? I only ask.
Then, lo, we discover
that her 'small flat' is not in the least like a prison; so the point of the elaborate
simile is lost. She is having a pleasant drink in a dwelling that does not
resemble a cell. One might as well write, 'It was as though he had returned
home and glanced in the mirror and discovered that his face had turned green,
except that he had not glanced in the mirror - and his face had remained its
normal colour.' Or, perhaps, he was a 'caged
prisoner' who had not returned home at all . . .
[Contributor: Steve Prasher, Stockport, Cheshire, U.K.]
[#68]
If only this were the
initial sentence to the novel, I would suggest changing the name of the
Bulwer-Lytton contest to the Herman Melville fiction contest; it is
unquestionably the most impressive potential entry for the contest that I've
ever seen, absolutely unbeatable if you ever run a "celebrity
Bulwer-Lytton contest" involving published writing. It's from that
"classic" of American literature, Moby Dick; from the chapter
"The Whiteness Of The Whale" (chapter 42); in this chapter, Melville
spends 7+ pages explaining why, although in many situations, white is
considered a GOOD color, in this instance, it seems more reminiscent of the
spectral and is therefore scary. The following sentence/paragraph takes up ONE
of those 7+ pages:
Though
in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly
enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles,
japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal pre-eminence in this hue; even
the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the
title 'Lord Of The White Elephants' above all their other magniloquent
ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same
snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the
one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian,
heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial
color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the
human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky
tribe; and though, besides all this, whiteness has been even made significant
of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though
in other mortal sympathies and symbolisings, this
same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things -- the innocence of
brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of
the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honour;
though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine
of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by
milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august
religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by
the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on
the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made
incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter
sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology,
that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to
the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though
directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name
of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or
tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps
of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in
the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the vision of St. John,
white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand
clothed in white before the great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these
accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime,
there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which
strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.[469
words]
[Contributor: Jim Yanni, University City, Missouri]
[#69]
THE WORD OF THE WEEK:It appears in the phrase "Markets have 'nichified.'"
used by Mr. and Mrs. A.Toffler, co-authors of Future
Shock writing in the Wall Street Journal. Did you realize that
something could be nichified? The logical conclusion
is that if someone is doing the classifying he (or she) is the Nichifier. If the classifier is really good, she (or he)
may go down in history as The Great Nichifier. If
you're the target, beware -- you've been nichified.
As a verb: I nichify, you nichify,
he (or she) nichifies, etc.
I must stop now
before I get pigeonholed in the wrong compartment, or compartmentalized in the
wrong pigeonhole. Whatever -- I've found my own little niche in the deep (very
deep) recesses of the publishing world - a contribution to "Sticks &
Stones" on the unique use of language by writers who were paid a
hell-of-a-lot more for their article than the contributors were paid for their
articles. As a matter of fact, if the Tofflers got
paid anything, it's a hell-of-a-lot more than I've been paid.
[Contributor: Samuel
W. Halper, Los Angeles, CA]
[#70]
The Star Trek novel, Killing
Time, by Della Van Hise (Original Series #24), is
in general a turkey of a book, with a truly bad basic concept (the Romulans tamper with the time stream in an attempt to
eradicate the Federation retroactively, and they succeed, sort of, in creating
an alternate time line, but about half of the Enterprise crew in the alternate
time-line (including Kirk and Spock) REMEMBER the original time line in their
dreams, and this, presumably, enables them to fix things.) Further, the
characterizations of the Romulan villains of the
piece are paper-thin, cardboard characters with no plausibility. But none of
this is the reason that I'm "honoring" the book here. No, I'm
"honoring" it for this passage: (pg. 66)
"He
rolled onto his back, and an illegible cry tightened the muscles in his thick
neck."
I hope I don't NEED
to point out that ALL cries are "illegible"; what she clearly meant
is "unintelligible." And authors who don't know the difference
between those two words shouldn't be writing. Of course, editors who don't know
the difference between those two words should likewise get out of the business,
but that's another question.
[Contributor: Jim Yanni, University City, Missouri]
[#71]
Dragonfly,
Frederic S. Durbin. Arkham
House Publishers, Inc., 1999.
I have not read such
long, involved and confusing sentences since I tried to read The Last Days
of Pompeii one boring summer when I was fourteen (It was my great-Aunt's
book and had an interesting frontpiece). Here is an
example of the first two sentence of the book:
"Bad
thing were starting to happen again in Uncle Henry's basement. These were
things that had happened before, when the wind swung round, when the trees all
felt the blood rush to their leaves after the exertion of August and the idling
of September; when the chuckle-dark harvest moon shaped pumpkins in its own
image, brought its secret wine flush to the scarcrows'
cheeks; when the rich bounties of the land lay plump for the taking and the
light left them alone for longer and longer at a time."
The entire book is
written in this manner.
[Contributor: Cindy
Rosser, Odessa, Texas]
[#72]
In the,
"metaphors run amok" category (so bad it's good):
"You
got further plucking the chicken in front of you than trying to start on one up
a tree. Especially when the tree was in another country, and there might not
even be another chicken."
Robert Jordan, The Path of Daggers, p. 421
[Contributor: Amy S. Bruckman, Atlanta, GA]
[#73]
Browsing on the web,
I came across a novel by Bertha Muzzy Bower called Jean of the Lazy A.
The first sentence is real Bulwer-Lytton contest material. This is a genuine
published novel:
How Trouble Came to
the Lazy A, Chapter One:
Without
going into a deep, psychological discussion of the elements in men's souls that
breed events, we may say with truth that the Lazy A ranch was as other ranches
in the smooth tenor of its life until one day in June, when the finger of fate
wrote bold and black across the face of it the word that blotted out prosperity,
content, warm family ties,--all those things that go to make life worth while. (How Trouble Came to
the Lazy A, Chapter One)
[Contributor: Tobias
Robison, Princeton, NJ]
[#74]
In Tides,
Melanie Tem writes from the point of view of a man with Alzheimer's and makes
sure her readers are as muddled as he is. Two examples:
Not
infrequently he did not recognize his daughter when she entered his field of
vision. (p.5)
Every
once in a while he got away, and the sense of freedom when he wasn't under
their gaze could be exhilarating, until he considered what it meant about his
life that he felt free when what he really was was
lost; what it said about him that just being out on the sidewalk or among trees
by himself made him feel freed; pretty pitiful, when you thought about it.
(5-6)
At that point, I
closed the book and felt freed myself.
[Contributor: Phillis Fox]
[#75]
In the March 8, 2001 Press-Democrat
(Sonoma County, California), sports writer Jeff Fletcher asks of San Francisco
Giants second baseman Jeff Kent (pp. c1 & c7) "How
does a kid from Huntington beach wind up castrating cows in South Texas?"
I would like to know
how a kid from anywhere can castrate cows, and not just in South Texas. Cows
are generally differently anatomically endowed. If he was milking them I would
understand. But this is Texas we're discussing and . . . well,
I wonder what they do with their bulls?
[Contributor: Bill
Crowley, Santa Rosa, CA]
[#76]
From A Monstrous
Regiment of Women by Laurie R. King (1995):
"The
solitary waitress, a thin woman with bad teeth, six hands, and the ability to
keep eight quick conversations on her tongue simultaneously, wove her way
through the nonexistence gaps, slapped a cup of tea onto the table in front of
me, and took my order for eggs and chips and beans on toast without seeming to
listen. The laden plate arrived before my sweet orange-coloured
tea had cooled, and I set to putting it inside me."
I did enjoy this
book. I was willing to forgive the six hands, the "nonexistence
gaps"(whatever such might be), and the eggs, chips, and beans all
apparently piled on toast (all three mixed together, or would one expect three
separate pieces of toast?). However, the image of Mary Russell, aspiring young
detective, attempting to stuff a dinner plate into her mouth (or other orifice)
-- that was too much. Ms. King knows how to write. She should learn how to
edit.
[Contributor: Randy Geithman]
[#77]
I love Laurell K. Hamilton's novels for a variety of reasons, but
her prose style is not one of them. Here's an example from Narcissus in
Chains that illustrates why:
"I
stalked him the way he'd stalked me, and part of me noticed that I was placing
my feet one atop the other, almost stepping in my own footsteps, like a
cat."
I had to stop reading
at this point, as I had a mental image of the intrepid heroine tripping over
her own feet to dispel. As I finally read on, so, too, had the author written on. And on and on.
"The
walk was oddly graceful, swaying my hips. My spine was very straight, shoulders
back, arms almost motionless at my sides, but there was a tension running
through my upper body, an anticipation of action, of violence."
There was a tension
running through my body, too, as I wondered when the Ms. Hamilton would get
past the overwrought description, already, and get back to the action.
[Contributor: E.
Powell, Tampa, FL]
[#78]
I have to submit this
as the worst metaphor ever for the act of making love. Written by Robert K. Tanenbaum, in one of the Butch Karp novels (i.e., Enemy
Within, Act of Revenge):
"And
then he was fully socketed to her, like a pipe wrench in a crock of warm
chili."
I swear to God I'm
not making this up. Robert must be a lonely man.
[Contributor: Jim Hintzen, Phoenix, AZ]
[#79]
Russell Crowe stars
in the over-produced Hollywood make of Patrick O'Brian's sea novel of the
Napoleonic wars, Master and Commander (1970), whose
opening sentence reads suspiciously like a Bulwer-Lytton Contest entry:
"Past
the word for Captain Aubrey, pass the word for Captain Aubrey," cried a
sequence of voices, at first dim and muffled far aft on the flagship's maindeck, then growing louder and more distinct as the call
wafted up to the quarterdeck and so along the gangway to the forecastle, where
Captain Aubrey stood by the starboard thirty-two-pounder carronade,
contemplating the Emperor of Morocco's purple galley as it lay off Jumper's
Bastion with the vast grey and tawny Rock of Gibraltar soaring behind it, while
Mr. Blake, once a puny member of his midshipman's berth but now a tall, stout
lieutenant almost as massive as his former captain, explained the new carriage
he had invented, a carriage that should enable carronades to fire twice as
fast, with no fear of oversetting, twice as far, and with perfect accuracy,
thus virtually putting an end to war.
[145 words]
[Contributor: T.
Smollett, Cooper's Droop, TN]
[#80]
I've always been a
huge fan of H.P. Lovecraft's work -- for many reasons, including his ability to
conjure up a really creepy atmosphere. Let's be honest though: prose was not
one of Lovecraft's strengths. The stories -- and the vision behind them -- more
than make up for his constant use of arcane adjectives. My favourites
have always been "gibbous," "fungoid," and "non-euclidian"). There are limits, however . . .
Lovecraft's first Randolph
Carter story, 'The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,"
has quite a hard-core fan following. Unlike most of his stuff, it's closer to
whimsical fantasy than to horror, and so it's a bit more
purple than the bulk of his work:
"So
to the organ chords of morning's myriad whistles, and dawn's blaze thrown
dazzling through purple panes by the great gold dome of the State House on the
hill, Randolph Carter leaped shoutingly awake within
his Boston room."
I can forgive that,
just about. I'd guess that the majority of the letters in the story are part of
sentences longer than 50 words. He insists on going on about ruddy Nyarlathotep, however. I lost count of how many times he
ends a sentence with a little note about the blind, hideous outer gods and the
fact that their soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep,
yadda yadda. In fact, he
seems to find it nearly impossible to mention Nyarlathotep
at all without reminding the reader that he's the messenger of the outer gods.
I can only assume he was being paid by the word.
I can even cope with
that, if I grit my teeth and skim. There is no excuse for describing anything
with a frothing 100+ word sentence, however. He does it twice* and hey, guess
how both of the sentences end . . .
The longer of the
two, at 113 words is:
"There
were, in such voyages, incalculable local dangers; as well as that shocking
final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no
dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes
and bubbles at the centre of all infinity - the
boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips
dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers
beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin,
monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping
dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic Ultimate gods, the blind,
voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other gods whose soul and messenger is the
crawling chaos Nyarlathotep."
(the other one ends: "awful voids outside the ordered universe where the
daemon sultan Azathoth gnaws hungrily in chaos amid
pounding and piping and the hellish dancing of the Other Gods, blind,
voiceless, tenebrous, and mindless, with their soul and messenger Nyarlathotep.")
Ah, the good old
days...
[Contributor: Ted Dedopulos, Prague, Czech.]
[And now, to Lovecraftian
Sites in New England, featured in Literary Locales]
[#81]
How glad I am to find a place to call
truly atrocious sentences to the public eye! I came across the following a few
years ago and doubt I will ever see a worse run-on. Please do me, and yourself,
two favors as you read this: 1) read it aloud the first time, even if you're
alone, to see if you can get to the end without cracking up laughing; and 2)
don't scroll to the end of the message (below the spoiler space) to read the
(well-known!) author's name before you read the sentence itself.
Without further ado, I present three
short sentences of lead-in (the first is sort of a doozy anyway) followed by
*the sentence*:
"On Monday, the
officers sent for Henry, having arrested him, arrived with him. The Mayor and
Attorney Gen'l took charge of him, and set their wits
to work to elicit a discovery from him. He denied, and denied, and persisted in
denying.
"They still plied
him in every conceivable way, till Wednesday, when, protesting his own
innocence, he stated that his brothers, William and Archibald, had murdered
Fisher; that they had killed him, without his (Henry's) knowledge at the time,
and made a temporary concealment of his body; that, immediately preceding his
and William's departure from Springfield for home, on Tuesday, the day after
Fisher's disappearance, William and Archibald communicated the fact to him, and
engaged his assistance in making a permanent concealment of the body; that, at
the time he and William left professedly for home, they did not take the road
directly, but, meandering their way through the streets, entered the woods at
the North West of the city, two or three hundred yards to the right of where
the road they should have travelled, entered them; that, penetrating the woods
some few hundred yards, they halted and Archibald came a somewhat different
route, on foot, and joined them; that William and Archibald then stationed him
(Henry) on an old and disused road that ran near by,
as a sentinel, to give warning of the approach of any intruder; that William
and Archibald then removed the buggy to the edge of a dense brush thicket,
about forty yards distant from his (Henry's) position, where, leaving the
buggy, they entered the thicket, and in a few minutes returned with the body,
and placed it in the buggy; that from his station he could and did distinctly
see that the object placed in the buggy was a dead man, of the general
appearance and size of Fisher; that William and Archibald then moved off with
the buggy in the direction of Hickox's mill pond, and
after an absence of half an hour, returned, saying they had put him in a safe
place; that Archibald then left for town, and he and William found their way to
the road, and made for their homes." (321 words)
from "The Trailor Murder Mystery" by Abraham
Lincoln (yes, that Lincoln!!!)
[This text was scanned from Dastardly Little Detective Stories, ed.
Weinberg et.al. (1993, Barnes and Noble Books).]
[Contributor: Roger Wolfson,
Redmond, WA]
[#82]
These sentences are from The Fiery
Cross by Diana Gabaldon. Her first three novels
were excellent, but in the past few years she seems to have adopted a new
credo: Never say in ten words what you can say in forty or fifty.
To find these examples, I simply opened
the book to a random page and copied. I'm sure there are longer ones, but I'm
not going to read all 979 pages again to find out.
"I was happy to see
it, but conscious of a small feeling of envy; I was all at once aware that I
had eaten nothing all day, that I was very cold, desperately tired, sore in a
number of places--and that without the complications of Mrs. Beardsley and her
companions, I would long since have been safely in Brownsville, fed warm, and
tucked up by some friendly fireside." [Word count: 69]
"Encouraged by the
dark, the faint sense of intimacy engendered by the exchange of names--or
simply from a need to talk, after so long--she told me about her mother, who
had died when she was twelve, her father, a crabber, and her life in Baltimore,
wading out along the shore at low tide to rake oysters and gather mussels,
watching the fishing craft and the warships come in past Fort Howard to sail up
the Patapsco." [Word count: 78]
The character described never shows up
in the book again after her inital thirty-page
introduction.
"The middle shelf
was given over to more light-minded reading; a small selection of romances,
slightly ragged with much reading, featuring Robinson Crusoe; Tom Jones, in a
set of seven small, leather-covered volumes; Roderick Random, in four
volumes; and **Sir Henry Richardson's [sic] monstrous Pamela, done in two gigantic octavo
bindings--the first of these decorated with multiple bookmarks, ranging from a
ragged dried maple leaf to a folded penwiper, these
indicating the points which various readers had reached before giving up,
either temporarily or permanently." [Word count: 87]
**[He must mean Samuel Richardson (and his
"monstrous novel" [over a million words] was Clarissa, not Pamela).]
Note how she kindly defines
"bookmark" for us in the last passage. Just in case we didn't know.
-- The following passage is from page
255 of The Prodigy by Noel Hynd. The novel is
about a piano player who gets possessed by the evil spirit of another pianist. Hynd has a fondness for repeating things, but this is the
funniest example I found flipping through. And yes, there really are that many
ellipses! [begin]
And he realized . . . the
music was not his.
The interpretation was
not his.
No, no, no, he told
himself. This cannot be! A dead man cannot be in my body. Rabinowitz
cannot be playing. I am Rolf Geiger and I am alive and Isador
Rabinowitz is dead and this cannot be happening!
But it was!
He heard the unmistakeable touch of Rabinowitz
upon the keys. In every note, in every bar and syllable.
Even the touch of Geiger's foot on the pedal relfected the execution and the interpretation of the dead
man.
. . . the
legato, the cantabile . . .
It wasn't Geiger's. It
was Rabinowitz's.
Who in God's name was
playing?
How in the Devil's name
could this be?
What the Living Hell was
going on?
[end]
To make matters worse, a great deal of
the preceding is in italics as well, most notably the capitalized "Living
Hell."
[Contributor: Lisa Krause, Huntington
MA]
[#83]
Perhaps some of you have heard of
Robert Jordan, and of his The Wheel of Time collection. Praised by many
critics as the best of its genre since J.R.R. Tolkien, I am thoroughly
engrossed in the 10 book saga. However, due to a series of horrible word plays,
I put the book down many times with a sick feeling in my stomach . . . I present
the earliest such examples, from The Eye of the World.
"He gave a bark of
laughter. ' I hear she chased old Luhhan
and the dogs, all three out of the house with a broom.' "
What an appropriate place for a
"bark" of laughter, right before a dog anecdote. Without skipping any
text from the book, it resumes:
"Rand winced and
laughed at the same time. ' If I were you, I'd worry
more about Alsbet Luhhan
than about the blacksmith. She's almost as strong and her temper is a lot
worse.' "
Wincing and laughing at the same time
huh? I'd like to see that. Alsbet is the blacksmith's
wife, described as "almost as strong and her temper is a lot worse."
Just in case you don't find the humor, remember what a blacksmith does... he
tempers steel. My stomach was in a knot.
[Contributor: Aspen, Summerland, MA]
[#84]
An article called "Sights from the
Long Tree" appeared in the Nauvoo Times and Seasons, of November 15, 1841 written by
my Great Great Uncle Lyman Littlefield (I include
only the first sentence).
"'Twas
morning--the sun rose under the brightest auspices, and the thin, vaporous
clouds that flitted in the heavens, continued gradually to flee away before the
gentle morning breeze, that seemed wont to greet their golden visages with the
soft rustle of its dewy wings--until not a hand's breadth of them were seen
remaining to mar the spotless beauty of the ethereal blue.
"
My great great
uncle Lyman named his first son Edward Lytton Littlefield, "out of respect
to Edward Lytton Bulwer who in recent years has been familiarly known as Lord
Lytton, and who in the early years of my life, ranked in my estimation, among
the most chaste and beautiful writers in fictitious literature."
Lyman Omer Littlefield (1819-1893)
wrote his Autobiography and published it as Reminiscences of Latter-day
Saints (Logan, Utah: The Utah Journal Co., 1888).
His complete autobiography can be found
at http://www.boap.org/LDS/Early-Saints/LLittlefield.html.
There are other excerpts I could submit where Lyman emulated the writing style
of Edward Lytton.
[Contributor: George W. Littlefield,
Long Beach, CA]
[#85]
This submission doesn't fall under the
usual category of poorly-written "novels" -- this is actually the
text of a sheet of instructions for a small remote-control car, bought at Radio
Shack. Obviously the Japanese company that fabricated it has yet to grasp the
subtle art of translation.
I'll dig it up every once and a while,
just to laugh at the sheer horridness of it all -- enjoy. Best read out loud,
if you're up to it.
Usage Manual
1) Is not suitable for
the 3 years old and the following child
2) Before beginning uses must hard finish reading this manual
3) Suggestion is under the person's leading usage
Safe Rule
1) prohibition against 3
years old below of child usage;
2) play attention, you of finger, hair, clothes ...etc. don't touch and car
wheel, in order to prevent quilt harm;
3) car while driving do not want to by hand grasp it
4) don't let the remote control close to any fire with car original;(such as
electric stove, stove beside, or mightiness of sunlight bottom)
5) not want the place in danger to play;(such as street, steep slope...etc.)
6) don't let the wet water of car, and not want under the rainy day is open-air
usage;
7) not want on the sand ground to play;
8) forbid the child to tear open the remote control with the car
9) if the car dash to piecesed, and should pass by
the person check or profession personnel maintain the rear can continue to use
I think that "mightiness of
sunlight bottom" takes the cake here.
[Contributor: C. Dearden,
Toronto, Ontario]
[#86]
A teaser in the Philadelphia Inquirer
on August 20th, 2004, read: "The Olympic track and field competition
begins today, with the anticipation of further drug bombshells hanging in the
air."
I don't know what a drug bombshell
looks like, and I'm not entirely sure why it would be subverting the laws of
gravity anyway. Don't bombshells usually fall?
[Contributor: Josh Rosenberg,
Philadelphia, PA]
[#87]
"For a temporary
shorthand-typist to be present at the discovery of a corpse on the first day of
a new assignment, if not unique, is sufficiently rare to prevent its being
regarded as an occupational hazard."
-- The opening sentence of P.D. James, Original
Sin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
[Contributor: Edward L. Saslow, Berkeley CA]
[#88]
A very prolific source of consistently
bad writing is the News Photos section of Yahoo News. The captions can make
your head spin. The one that comes most readily to mind relates to the Georgia
crematorium scandal. This caption accompanied a photo of two men who had
apparently been helping to retrieve the bodies, and who were walking away from
the site. The caption started:
"Two men carrying
shovels that didn't want to be identified . . ."
The writer respected the shovels'
wishes and didn't name them. And these people get paid to write this stuff?
[Contributor: Jean Herndon, Kaysville,
UT]
[#89]
I'm not sure if Web pages count, but
here's a description of some software from http://www.jumsoft.com/process/ :
Process 1.0, Jumsoft's fresh face in the tired throng of outlining
applications, is destined to draw a crowd all of its own. Its sublime,
user-friendly Aqua interface makes outlining with Mac OS X a treat. But that's
only the start of this all-round wonderful experience. The end result is more
remarkable still: Process 1.0 doesn't just make it simpler to organize your
ideas and projects; it has a favorable effect on the outcome of all your
planning that is nothing short of subliminal.
"Nothing short
of subliminal," eh? In other words, you
don't notice any effect.
[Contributor: Alan Palmer, London, UK]
[#90]
From River Road by JoAnn Ross:
When he heard the shower
turn on, Finn imagined her naked, imagined himself joining her in that compact
shower, smoothing the fragrant soap that clung to her skin and made him think
of dark-eyed gypsies dancing around burning campfires over her lush curves.
How shall I count the ways . . . long,
long, long. Why does the soap make him think of gypsies? Small gypsies, too, if
they can dance over her curves, and I really hate it when they light fires
there, too. Ouch.
[Contributor: Janet Mullany.
Cheverly, MD]
[#91]
I recently bought some putty,
manufactured in China. It came with the instructions, 'before
using putty, peel off skin and roll into a small ball between your finger and
thumb.'
Pretty serious stuff! It's a bit like
the notice on the gents toilet in Hong Kong that said,
'do not enter a lady here.'
On another occasion I bought some
adhesive car door protectors. The accompanying instructions were quite
enlightening.
To
avoid the bonkings in the parkings.
Clean off fat and grease.
Stick the rubber side up before closing doors.
Shine your light from backside. If you donot see
reflection you are on wrong side of mirror.
I think Alice or the White Rabbit would
see some sense in this.
[Contributor: Barnaby Drake, Tasmania]
[#92]
From The Bride Finder, Susan Carrroll:
"An anguished cry
escaped him. It didn't disturb Madeline, for he trapped it deep within his
soul."
Somebody ought to send this woman a
dictionary so she can look up the meanings of "cry,"
"escaped," and "trapped."
[Contributor: Rose Wild, Perth, Australia]
[#93]
- -From Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,
by Tom Robbins
"It is not a belly
button. (The umbilicus serves, then withdraws, leaving but a single footprint
where it stood: the navel, wrinkled and cupped, whorled and domed, blind and
winking, bald and tufted, sweaty and powdered, kissed and bitten, waxed and
fuzzy, bejeweled and ignored; reflecting as graphically as breasts, seeds or
fetishes the omnipotent fertility in which Nature dangles her muddy feet, the
navel looks in like a plugged keyhole on the center of our being, it is true,
but O navel, though we salute your motionless maternity and the treams that have got tangled in your lint, you are only a
scar, after all; you are not it.)"
Amazingly, this is not the most painful
paragraph Tom Robbins has produced. It is followed by the detailed discussion
of the rectal temperature of an oyster and later by a self-indulgent
celebration of the hundredth page of the novel. Excruciating
stuff.
[Contributor: Erin Buttermore,
Tasmania]
[#94]
Let me commend your attention to the
outstanding author Lorenzo Montesini who 'holds
courtesy titles as Prince Giustiniani, Count of the Phanaar, Knight of Saint Sophia and Baron Alexandroff.' He currently (1999) resides in Sydney.
Copies of the Prince's 1986 self-published
messterpiece, Cardboard Cantata, signed, are
to be found in numbers on the shelves of charity stores throughout Sydney,
crammed beside the fat, tinsel-wrappered tomes of
Danielle Steel, Sydney Sheldon, and other 'read-it-once-and-toss-it-away' word-wights. But 'Cardboard Cantata' is a sleeper, a treasure, a
keeper. I collect literary dreck, particularly the self-published, because it
is instructive (bad writing teaches what not to do, using examples one would
just never have thought up oneself), but it must be the genuine article. It
must be clear that the author cannot write any better. Steel, Sheldon, Collins
and their ilk are obvious pros at confecting best-selling schlock. The Prince,
however, is a rocking chair natural. A gem: cut and polished marcasite of
purest ray serene.
I cite just the opening paragraph
(which I nominate for win, place, or show in the Opening Paragraph Most
Overburdened with Exposition World Championships), but one can open this
wondrous book at random and cull exquisitely cack-handed pars from every page.
'The shriek detonated
throughout the big house. It seemed to gather momentum rather than follow the
laws of harmonics. The young gardener looked up from the hedge he was clipping,
mumbled something in an aside, then calmly returned to
his task, a cheeky expletive on his lips. Farah, the maid in the kitchen looked
up, raised her eyebrows and continued to scrape the grapefruit into the Minton
dish. Nellie ran upstairs as soon as she heard the sound, she was the only one
to act positively in the household, she knew her
mistress was awake.'
After just a few sentences, our author
emerges draped in satin sashes for Most Muddled Metaphor, Nouveau
Name-Dropping, Toshiest Tautology, Outrageous
Overwriting, Damnably Dangling Participles, Foozled Physics, and Simple
Illogicality (Second Class, with Raised Eyebrows). And we've barely started our
tale.
I can't forbear to include the second par, it is so loaded with beauty. Please do not adjust the punctuation, it is here just as it was printed:
'She ran panting, she
found her, Babylonia Grushman-her mistress in bed,
the papers opened around her, Women's Wear Daily opened in front of her, a
beatific smile on her lips and eyes. Nellie could not figure out whether she
looked evil or transfigured, it was as if she was a Buddha in absolute Nirvana.
Nellie had seldom seen her like this before and felt like an interloper in a
strange religious ceremony.'
I dare not cite the third par, it may well kill you with aesthetic surfeit. I shall
have to go and lie down myself in a darkened room with a cold cloth upon my
brow, but come on, fess up. Is not our precious Prince just The Goods when it
comes to Ditziest Glitz Writer of the Antipodes? And
Viking has published his autobiography . . .
[Contributor: Stephen Gard]
[#95]
The opening paragragh of Seetee
Shock by Jack Williamson.
"The void leered.
Implacable hostility flattened itself against the frosty dark, awaiting the
time to strike. Shocking danger fled away from him into the sucking emptiness,
and cunningly eluded him, and ruthlessly returned. Timeless peril watched
forever, with the cruel, cold eyes of the stars.
Nicol Jenkins, spatial engineer, fought back silently."
That's as far as I've got, one day I
hope to read the next paragragh.
[Contributor: George Stott, Edinburgh,
Scotland]
[#96]
From Barbara Boxer's
new novel, A Time to Run. And yes, it is about
two horses having sex.
"A ton of finely
tuned muscle, hide glistening, the crest of his mane risen
in full sexual display, and his neck curved in an exaggerated arch that
reminded Greg of a horse he'd seen in an old tapestry in some castle in Europe
Jane had dragged him to."
Simply awful.
I mean, mind-bogglingly awful. Scratch out your eyes awful. And yet she
continues.
"The stallion
approached, nostrils flared, hooves lifting with delicate precision, the
wranglers hanging on grimly. ... The stallion rubbed his nose against the
mare's neck and nuzzled her withers. She promptly bit him on the shoulder and,
when he attempted to mount, instantly became a plunging devil of teeth and
hooves. ... Greg clutched the rails with white knuckles, wondering, as these
two fierce animals were coerced into the majestic coupling by at least six
people, how foals ever got born in the wild."
[Contributor: David Lemmon, Columbus,
Ohio]
[#97]
I work for a trade publishing company,
and one of our products is a line of manuals for electricians. This sentence is
from the pre-edited text of a book on emergency power systems, as sent to us by
the writer:
"Simply reading these
words about an emergency power system that we have not seen or worked with does
not sufficiently describe the importance of this type of system; but putting
oneself in the position of being in the emergency room of a hospital having a
severed artery sewn closed when a tornado destroys the electrical utility
overhead pole-type distribution system and the room turns to blackness begins
to add clarity."
Indeed. In fact it was such a good
example I've kept it for four years.
[Contributor: Holly Messinger,
Kansas City, MO]
[#98]
OK, I'm reading a book called The
Lady Killer by Samantha Saxon, published in 2005.
These examples I found on three
consecutive pages.
"The boy swallowed,
his chubby cheeks bouncing on his face."
Hey, it'd been to bad if
they bounced right off, hey?
Then "the
lad ran in stuttered steps." Wha? The dictionary says that word refers to a voice speaking
or the rattle of guns, neither of which are relevant to how the boy walks.
And finally, "Falcon
starred at the wooden top still lying motionless on the floor and purposely
looked away . . ." Well duh.
Just bad writing, not
the worst, but irritating.
[Contributor: Michele Kiger, Laguna
Beach]
[#99]
I thought I'd call your attention to
Jim Caple's serial novel 24 College Avenue. It
starts out describing the lives of a few college students who live off-campus
together, but then realizes it has no idea where it's going, treads water for
about 30 chapters, and finally decides on this bizarre plot where the President
of the United States is a member of this Skull-and-Bones-type secret society
made up of "fops" who talk in the most stereotypically elitist
English imaginable. Here's a link to the most recent chapter, which I thought
was a particularly good example of how woeful a writer Caple
is.
Some highlights:
"How could you
betray me like this? I trusted you! I made love to you! And it turns out you're one of ... them." She not only spat out the
final word, she spat in his face. Emmenthaler
nonchalantly drew out a monogrammed handkerchief and wiped away the spit.
"If it makes you feel any better, the sex was great," he said."
"You make it sound
so simple," the president replied. "Do you know how much Escalades
cost, not to mention bling bling?"
"We don't need to
get personal, Hudson," the president said, pacing in front of the
housemates. "Our plot was foolproof, absolutely foolproof until you
meddling kids got involved."
"Save your breath.
You may have the power to unleash a nuclear winter, but you don't intimidate
me. You don't know what intimidation is until you've had to deal with a shoe
factory foreman in Saigon. Now, those guys are tough."
"It sounded as if he
had a wolverine caught in his throat."
"I gained 15 pounds
of muscle. How could I do that if I wasn't taking a steroid?" "How?" Higgins said. "Simple. Extra helpings at the training table, more hours in the weight
room, and most important -- confidence." (MOST...CLICHE...EVER)
Note: This ESPN-sponsored page (
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/collegeave/story?id=2156943) sports
a number of indicators that it could well be an homage
to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
[Contributor: Ben Kessler-Reynolds,
Ridgefield, CT]
[#100]
You may have seen this one before, and
I would love to see how it does in the real contest compared to everyone
else's.
"Almost
inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale
hand of an enormous albino with long white hair."
--Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
Dan Brown should be considered a new
Bulwer-Lytton, having sold a lot of books but written them abysmally. I've even
started a site, http://almostinconceivably.blogspot.com,
where I intend to document his lexical clumsiness the way Twain
did Fenimore Cooper's. I don't have much yet, but I
will soon.
[Contributor: Marcus, Austin, TX]
[#101]
Vanity Fair
weighs in with a fawning story on two of our reigning celebutards--gasp!--Tom
Cruise and Katie Holmes and Baby Suri:
"Tom's mother, an
upbeat, outgoing woman from Louisville, Kentucky, moves in closer. She watches
her son and daughter-in-law-to-be kiss. She sees her granddaughter Suri smile for the camera. The sun reddens the peak in the
distance. Tom's mom begins to cry. Others on the hillside start to well up too.
Tom seems to be forcing back the tears himself."
"Daughter-in-law-to-be"
because Tom has not yet made an honest woman of Katie. Maybe
after Suri reaches the 5th Stage of Englightenment.
[Contributor: Claude Hopper, Coopers
Droop, TN]
[102]
This is an excerpt from Patricia
Cornwell's 2005 book named Predator in the Kay Scarpetta
series.
"Wind gusting in
from the bay sounds like silk whipping, reminding her of silk stockings
whipping on a clothesline, although she has never seen silk stockings on a
clothesline or heard what they sound like in the wind. She is aware of the
woman's black stockings because tall stools and short, slitted
skirts are a not a safe combination unless a woman is in a bar where men are
interested only in one another, and in Provincetown, this is usually the
case."
I'm not quite sure what to say about
this paragraph except that it makes me want to ask Ms. Cornwell, "What's
the color of the sky in your world?"
[Contributor: Edie Shulman, GA]
[103]
Here are a few excerpts from Morgan
Hawke's Enchantment in Crimson http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1554101557/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-5491606-8349646?_encoding=UTF8&v=glance
Morgan Hawke loves adjectives. She hugs
them and squeezes them and gives them a home and calls them George. She will
never put a healthy adjective to sleep. Sadly. In
fact, it got to the point when I felt defensive and angry for the poor nouns
that weren't deemed good enough for even ONE
adjective.
A blindingly handsome,
young man was sitting on one of the barstools nursing an imported beer. His
dark, straight hair was pulled back into a tight tail that fell over his
shoulder and brushed his forearm. His pale, chiseled face was pared to the bone
showing fine, sharp features and full lips that belonged on the cover of a pulp
vampire novel.
Ah yes, you say, but surely we need
adjectives when it comes to describing what is obviously the
hero -- even if he does look like a cross between DEATH from the Discworld and Mick Jagger. But
read on . . .
Jennifer, her tastefully
made-up face wreathed with a deep scarlet smile, came thumping up the tiny
staircase in her shiny, black plastic, platform boots. She practically danced
with excitement into the circular booth.
Jennifer giggled,
struggling to sit in her exquisitely short, super tight, red plastic skirt.
Daintily, she crossed her legs, exposing a long line of trim, black
fishnet-encased thigh.
Jennifer licked her
artfully painted lips and darted a look over her shoulder, tossing her short
and stylish, bright blond bob that curled around her ears.
And yes, she starts just about every
paragraph with a character's name, too. It's very wearing.
[Contributor: Le Fantôme]
[104]
I'd like to nominate a few more
sentences from Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World, if I may. From the first
chapter, An Empty Road:
The pale sun sat above
the trees to the east, but its light was crisply dark, as if mixed with shadow.
Not only is this light
dark, which would seem to be impossible, since light is by definition NOT dark,
but it also has physical texture.
Gusts plastered Rand al'Thor's cloak to his back, whipped the earth-colored wool
around his legs, then streamed it out behind.
Er
. . . how is the wind managing to blow in three directions at once?
A double handful of geese
waddled about, beadily eyeing the ground but not finding anything worth
pecking, and someone had tethered a milkcow to crop
the sparse growth.
How much is
"a double handful of geese"? I would think that even one goose would
take two hands to hold it.
I'd also like to mention that Jordan
has a tendency to give different characters very similar names. For example:
[contributor:
Tracey Pennington]
[105]
"Strapped into the
quivering soup can laughingly called a plane, bouncing his way on the pummeling
air through the stingy window of light that was winter, through the gaps and
breaks in snow-sheathed mountains toward a town called Lunacy, Ignatious Burke had an epiphany."
Northern Lights, Nora Roberts
This is one of the worst sentences I
have ever read. Doesn't anyone edit this woman any longer?
[Contributor: Lorna Younger, Salt
Point, NY]
[106]
"Sandy-blonde hair
to her shoulders, held up in a simple ponytail by a green rubber band fresh off
the newspaper. No makeup. Strong back, long lines. Rigid and
stern, but also graceful. Cold but quietly beautiful.
Complicated and busy, but also in need. More like an
onion than a banana. Her eyes looked like the green that sits just beneath the
peel of an avocado, and her lips like the red part of the peach that sits up
next to the seed."
--"When Crickets Cry,"
Charles Martin
I think he was hungry when he wrote
this.
[Contributor: Katherine Murphy, Boston,
MA]
[107]
From Pg. 754 of Bronze Horseman,
by Paullina Simons:
"Alexander's bronze
eyes were toffee pools of pain."
Oh, come on! :(
[Contributor: S. Pearson, Montreal]
[108]
"It was the first
evening in weeks that no one needed seclusion or restraint, and the hallways
echoed with the sound of nurses unclenching their teeth."
To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann,
Gail A. Hornstein
If teeth are unclenched in the forest
when there is no one there, do they make a sound?
[Contributor: Lee Grossman, Oakland,
CA]
[109]
This excerpt is taken from the local
newspaper, The West Australian. It presumably pays its reporters, but
when they provide astute insights such as these, one seriously questions why.
Actual title of an article: "Richest nations share largest share of global
wealth"
[Contributor: L Smith, Perth,
Australia]
[110]
Below, from a press release from the
Oregon Department of Forestry, which I have cherished for years--I get it out
each summer at the beginning of fire season and send it around to my fellow
reporters as an example of the very best kind of overheated (ha!) writing.
Clearly, Sticks & Stones
will allow even more people to enjoy its drama. I might note that there are two
opposing camps regarding favorite sentences in the release: I am in the group
that likes "well-choreographed aerial
acrobatics with warlike assault maneuvers, taking turns dropping gallon after
gallon of waters to squelch the flames." (Hand over the thesaurus,
Mac, I'm still using it!)
Others, however, prefer the simpler
phrase "drop their liquid loads."
You decide. But be warned: it's an
awesome responsibility.
[Contributor: Jeanie Senior, Hood
River, OR]
[111]
'"You look very
pretty today," he said casually, and she stiffened imperceptibly, but he
didn't see it.' --- Danielle Steel, Malice
Another classic from
our favorite purple proseur.
Normally far more sensible, I resorted to reading my first (and, I vowed within
the first few pages, only) Steel abomination in a fit of boredom one school
holiday. Even at the tender age of 16, I clearly recall wincing as my eyes
scraped past this horrible, horrible woman's butchery of my beloved mother
tongue [see #1 above].
[Contributor: Conrad]
[112]
This doozy of a mixed metaphor came
from the student newspaper at the University of Kentucky. The writer was
presumably not being paid to write, but close enough.
"If you happen to
visit a friend in Blanding Hall this semester, you may notice the soft tongue
of the French language resonating in your ear like molasses."
I didn't know languages had tongues.
And I certainly don't know French well enough to permit it to put its tongue in
my ear. And does molasses resonate at all, let alone in an enclosed space like
an ear?
[Contributor: Bob, Lexington, KY]
[113]
Newt Gingrich and
William A. Forstchen for their new "active
history", Pearl Harbor.
I must admit, I discovered this passage
by reading Janet Maslin's review in The New York Times, dated Thursday, May
24th. The credit belongs to her, as she was the one who actually had to read
the damn thing.
"James nodded his
thanks, opened the wax paper and looked a bit suspiciously at the offering, it
looked to be a day or two old and suddenly he had a real longing for the
faculty dining room on campus, always a good selection of Western and Asian
food to choose from, darn good conversations to be found, and here he now sat
with a disheveled captain who, with the added realization, due to the direction
of the wind, was in serious need of a good shower."
Really quite something for a could-be presidential nominee.
[Contributor: Jason Woodruff, Astoria,
Queens, NY]
[114]
Read the following excerpt from Newt
Gingrich and William Forstchen's new novel: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/books/24masl.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1180065836-AIVcz4onSIsJ8YMQHUUbZQ
and--wow!--this is really a contender:
"James nodded his
thanks, opened the wax paper and looked a bit suspiciously at the offering, it
looked to be a day or two old and suddenly he had a real longing for the
faculty dining room on campus, always a good selection of Western and Asian
food to choose from, darn good conversations to be found, and here he now sat
with a disheveled captain who, with the added realization, due to the direction
of the wind, was in serious need of a good shower."
. . but I
don't think I can legally enter it on Newt's behalf.
Or can I?
[Contributor: Gretchen Schmidt, Coral
Gables, FL]
[115]
"Something whiffy
this way comes."
I've recently borrowed a few of G P
Taylor's novels, since a few people had mentioned them. I suspected I'd loathe
them, because one or two people had described him as "the next C. S.
Lewis" (he most definitely isn't), but they actually aren't too bad.
Except for one thing.
One sentence. One simile. Actually, two similes, because I got rather weary of him comparing
every high-ceilinged room or forest to the interior of a cathedral, but since
he's a priest I can let that slide. Perhaps it's just my taste, but I
honestly can't take someone who can commit a simile like the one I'm about to
reveal as a decent writer ever again.
It's from his latest, The Curse of
Salamander Street. Page 208, if you have the book.
The characters are creeping through an underground cavern, hunting what may be
a werewolf.
They gathered pace as
they walked. The passageway grew narrow and low, causing them to crouch as they
stumbled on. The sound of water grew louder, and the gusting of the wind was
like the eerie farting of a giant animal.
Tell me, please, how farting can
reasonably be described as 'eerie'? In my experience, wind (of the atmospheric
variety) very rarely if ever sounds flatulent – perhaps if it blows under a
loose tarpaulin, making it vibrate, but otherwise, really, not. Certainly not,
I think, in a pothole under the Derbyshire Peaks, though I'm happy to be corrected
by a caver with the requisite experience. The characters don't appear to think
that the werewolf may be guffing loudly at them,
anyway.
And how in blue pencil blazes
did it get past his editor?
[116]
I just read this and had to share it.
In Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, a bit of light reading that I started
with low expectations but this was really too much and I had to share it:
"For no good reason,
I held my breath as I passed the sign welcoming me to Wind Gap, the way kids do
when they drive by cemeteries. It had been eight years since I'd been back, but
the scenery was visceral."
The scenery was what? I hope it didn't
hurt.
[Contributor: Diane Sarginson,
Edmonton, Alberta]
[117]
Leo thought to himself,
later, later I'll think about what it really means to be transported fifty-one
years into the future by a UFO.
Caroline Macdonald, The
Eye Witness, Hodder & Stoughton, Sydney.
(I very much enjoy this author's work,
but this redundancy annoys me no end and I see it all the time. You can't think
to anyone BUT yourself!)
Crossing the floor, her
foot bled all over the carpet.
Margaret Mahy,
One of the Fortune Quartet Books; can't remember which.
(Here's another author whom I very much
admire, but the image of a foot crossing the floor all by itself is hilarious.)
Then he'll be waiting at
the door with a battery of high-powered solicitors waving writs and a couple of
policemen.
(I'd also like to see the policemen
waving the solicitors, preferably VERY hard.)
But that didn't make the
man who had fathered Perdita's behaviour
any less despicable.
(Um ... I thought we were the parents
of our own behaviour.)
Four years had put on a
little weight . . .
Caution steadied her
voice, made her voice offhand as she shrugged.
(There were a lot of other close repetitions
in this book; this was the most awkward.)
Robyn Donald, Element of Risk,
Harlequin Mills & Boon
(Element of Risk was also
peppered with the worst purple prose I've ever encountered but I don't appear
to have saved any of it.)
At the sound, a volley of
arrows arced through the morning blue like a flock of deadly sparrows.
Brian Caswell, Merryl of the Stones,
University of Queensland Press
(Another writer whose work I enjoy, but
the idea of sparrows looking even vaguely like arrows jerked me right out of
the story.)
If he were wrong, we
might then have an excuse to call this crazy thing off.
John Marsden, A Killing Frost, Macmillan
Children's Books
(We're not in the subjunctive mood
here. So many writers use the subjunctive rule incorrectly that I'd like to see
it abolished. As a kid I could never understand why I became more than one
person in the phrase, "If I were you". There were also some
irritating plurals presented in possessive form--e.g. 44's
for 44-litre drums of diesel and k's for kilometres.)
. . . she
could only shout hopelessly as loud as she could, in frustration, expecting no
answer,
"Lyo!"
"What?" he said beside her. Her shout turned into a scream; she
seemed to levitate before his eyes. He bent quickly to pick up the mussels she
had dropped. She came back down to earth finally and glared at his shaking
shoulders.
(The sudden, brief viewpoint change in
the middle of a sentence is disconcerting.) Patricia A McKillip,
The Changeling Sea, Oxford University
Press
(McKillip is
an extremely good writer. Fortunately she doesn't normally make errors like
this.)
Frightened of the dark,
he thought: how awful. Just like a baby. Stephen would never have been
frightened of the dark, up here. (Incorrect use of the word
"frightened"; it should be "afraid".
Another option would be
"frightened by".) Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising, Chatto & Windus Ltd (Bodley Head)
(Not a serious error, definitely not
serious enough to drag me out of the story.)
But if it were in the
hydro it was well hidden.
(Apart from "it" being
referred to in the plural as well as the singular, we are not in the
subjunctive mood here.)
Andre Norton, Plague Ship, Methuen Children's Books (Magnet)
Kate sensed something
familiar about this person staring so rudely, and felt uncomfortable by it.
("And it made her feel
uncomfortable" might have made more sense.)
The girl's round black
eyes bored into Kate's, which were equally round but very blue.
(How can eyes bore into each other? And
this book won the Tom Fitzgibbon Award!)
As the heavy wooden door
creaks open, the black crow squawks and flies straight between us so that we
have to duck to the side, coming to rest on Rhauk's
extended elbow.
(One person coming to rest on another's
elbow is startling enough, but TWO?)
Heather Cato, Dark Horses,
Scholastic. Editor: Penny Springthorpe
(I have to admit I didn't enjoy this
long-winded, self-indulgent YA novel. The blurb made it sound far more exciting
than it was.)
[Contributor: Laraine
Anne Barker]
[118]
Peter Straub in The Hellfire Club
(complete with a quote from Stephen King on the front cover) serves up this
gem:
"A door closed, and
the Italian Girl, Maria, the short gray-haired woman who decades ago had
replaced the famous Helen Day, called the Cup Bearer, at other times referred
to more mysteriously as O'Dotto, came out of Daisy's
studio carrying an empty tray."
The mystery appears to be in the
meaning.
Since when was an Italian girl named
anything but Maria?
[Contributor: Arlington Nuetzel, Gosnell, AK]
[119]
I'd like to nominate J.K. Rowling. Her
later books show an appalling lack of editing. I offer several examples,
because the media has convinced the public that she is a veritable goddess of
writing. Not always. Not in the last two books.
First, this sentence, from Chapter 28
of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:
Then, around the corner,
gliding noiselessly, came Dementors,
ten or more of them, visible because they were of a denser darkness than their
surroundings, with their black cloaks and their scabbed and rotting hands.
Because black clothes
are extremely visible in complete darkness.
They're practically phosphorescent. And what, exactly, is "denser
darkness"? Thicker darkness? More
stupid darkness?
Second, this sentence
from the same chapter. The sentence is
ninety words long.
He saw the achingly
familiar Hogsmeade High Street: dark shop fronts, and
the outline of black mountains beyond the village and the curve in the road
ahead that led off towards Hogwarts, and light spilling from the windows of the
Three Broomsticks, and with a lurch of the heart, he remembered with piercing
accuracy, how he had landed here nearly a year before, supporting a desperately
weak Dumbledore, all this in a second, upon landing -- and then, even as he
relaxed his grip upon Ron's and Hermione's arms, it happened.
Which, I should point
out, doesn't make sense if you break it down.
First, at this point in the story,
Harry Potter has visited Hogsmeade about ten to
twelve times in his seventeen-going-on-eighteen years of life, allowing for
cancellations because of school emergencies, so "achingly familiar"
is an overstatement.
Second, I can see the shop fronts being
familiar, but dark shop fronts shouldn't be familiar unless all the Hogsmeade stores are shutting down due to a recession.
Third, about the black mountains Harry
mentions. This is the same boy who, in Chapter 7 of Deathly Hallows,
insisted that Voldemort couldn't be in a village in
England because a village with "a mountainous
horizon and the outline of the little village cradled in a deep valley . . .
didn't look like anywhere in England."
Fourth, I'm really not certain why the
road to Hogwarts is being described, especially as Harry and his friends aren't
going to end up using it.
Fifth, "he
remembered with piercing accuracy" is authorial intrusion.
Rowling's done it before, too, in Chapter 13 of Harry Potter and the
Half-Blood Prince: "This time," said
Dumbledore, "we are going to enter my memory. I think you will find it
both rich in detail and satisfyingly accurate.
If the memory is detailed and accurate,
Rowling, you won't have to tell me. I'll notice on my own. The fact that you're
telling me this ahead of time makes me suspect that you know it's neither, but
that you hope I'll believe you and not the evidence of my own eyes.
Sixth, we hack our way through the
underbrush all the way to the end of this torturously long sentence, and the
only thing we find out at the end is that "it happened"? WHAT
happened?
Third, this line,
from Chapter 25 of Deathly Hallows.
It combines two fatal flaws--wooden dialogue and lack of logic.
"It is I, Remus John
Lupin!" called a voice over the howling wind.
Harry experienced a thrill of fear; what had happened? "I am a werewolf,
married to Nymphadora Tonks,
and you, the Secret-Keeper of Shell Cottage, told me the address and bade me
come in an emergency!" A) Remus sounds like
the Demon King in a Christmas pantomime. B) If the person he's addressing (Bill
Weasley, for reference) is the person who is
magically keeping the location of Shell Cottage secret, which is what a
Secret-Keeper does in the Potterverse...why is Remus
yelling this news aloud to anyone who might be listening, including the
villains?
Fourth, this sentence from Chapter 22
of Half-Blood Prince:
"There, there,"
said Slughorn, waving his wand so that the huge pile
of earth rose up and then fell, with a muffled sort of crash, onto the dead
spider, forming a smooth mound.
The earth falls with a muffled . . .
CRASH? Fine. I'm just going to assume that the soil of
Hogwarts is made of metal, okay?
[Contributor: Tracey Pennington, West
Hartford, CT]
[120]
"A violent southwest
wind rolled ragged black clouds low over the town and the flatly swollen drops
of an intemperate rain formed a slanting silver screen all around him, dimpling
the street's watery mud and dancing a crystal dance on glistening
rooftops." Canyon Passage
by Ernest Haycox (1945)
"He let the reigns drop over the saddlehorn, and
brought the fiddle round in front of him. There was no hurry,
he would be there before daylight. And he laughed as he ran his right thumb
over the strings: "What a combination--a fool, a fiddle and a
tractor." The Desert Fiddler by William H. Hamby (1919)
[Contributor: Jeff Solow, Philadelphia, PA]