Wisconsin Man Writes Best Bad Prose
This is a little bit random, but the story caught my eye and made me chuckle, so I thought I’d repost. A Madison man, Jim Gleeson, won San Jose State University’s 2007 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, beating out thousands of other entrants. Gleeson submitted 20 entries, and this was the winner:
“Gerald began - but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them ‘permanently’ meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash - to pee.”
Now that right there is some God-awful writing. What’s really disturbing to me is that as bad as Gleeson’s entry was, I’ve seen some pretty comparable writing from folks who weren’t trying to write poorly; they just have no skill at all.