“For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss–a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.”
This sentence, penned by Molly Ringle, is the winner of the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, otherwise known as the prize for worst sentence of the year. (I learned of this contest via the always informative @GalleyCat.) Obviously the judges did their job, because this sentence is pretty bad. And congrats to Molly, because writing something this bad is harder than it seems.
The Bulwer-Lytton Award isn’t exactly well publicized, and I’m sure many of you are disappointed to know submissions have already closed. So . . . I hereby announce a new competition, The Worst of More Bad Sentences of 2010! (Even the name is an inspiration!)
Rules: You must compose the sentence yourself, and it must be terrible. Trying to sneak in luminous and/or breathtaking prose will be cause for immediate disqualification.
Prize: Winner, to be chosen in a completely subjective process by me, will receive one signed copy of The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott.
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I’m going to need to enter multiple times.
Despite the fact that we’ve been swamped with entries, I’m going to go ahead and allow that.
Here is a sentence I for realsie wrote yesterday:
“The moment I figure out what’s going on, I feel like I’ve been kicked in the chest by a clown wearing stilts.”
I can’t believe I just posted that.
This is easily the most elegantly bad of the sentences.
Against my better judgment (which is probably the point)
“His enthusiasm for the mail-order bride had fizzled almost immediately — she spent her days listless in the bathtub or moping around the house, wanting for the sort of constant care and attention that made him suspect he had accidentally ordered sea-monkeys from the back of that Russian magazine.”
Sadly, I have no problem believing that I just posted that.
Damnit! I just realized that no matter what we do, Kelly is going to have to mail the book to Mel Gibson.
Without reservation, she pushed her grandma out of the way as if she was shoving off her regretful acceptance to be a bridesmaid, yet again.
Nice!
It was with a mixture of shame and severe cramping that she pulled the box of stolen super plus Tampax, Hershey bars and paperback/dvd box set of Twilight out of her knapsack for the Police and WalMart clerk to investigate.
Oh, wow. I’m sort of speechless. That’s . . . terrible. Good job!
If only _she_ had been speechless. Nice!
Oh, I love this one! I am imagining some Yankee Candles in that knapsack, too.
Unbeknownst to Karl — though fully beknownst to Emil, the self-aggrandizing minister of the Duke’s sugarplum plantation which nestled in the torrid, hoary armpit of the jungle like so much caked deodorant — his fly was down.
Bonus points for raising a little bile in the back of my throat!
Just a little? I have failed you, Mister-san.
Dracula, Wolf-Man, and Frankenstein entered the bar, like a bad joke looking for a premise, because actually they were a bad joke that was being told by Steve at the dance club (called a “discotheque” by the French, which Steve never did due to not being French himself) in a clumsy attempt to get Emma to go home with him that probably wasn’t going to work, Steve could see as he recited the punchline (which was delivered by the bartender, who was also in the joke, although Steve hadn’t mentioned there was a bartender, probably because he just assumed that if Dracula, Wolf-Man, and Frankenstein came into a bar, the fact that there was a bartender was implied).
IT IS ON.
When he opened the box, Bono Jefferson was struck by awe, not merely because of the realization that his late father had bequeathed to him his highly treasured RealDoll™, but because of the note explaining that the RealDoll™—who had no name, and would never have one until she completed her personal quest to discover what her name was and thus attained her humanity—could move and talk and answer questions when certain magical words were spoken, which of course for security purposes were not listed on the note, which said that Bono should just ask his father to whisper them to him when he arrived—he was always late, Bono’s father; while Bono’s wife, Chris, was struck not by awe but by lightning, because she was holding a golf club taped to another golf club, which had been constructed by the couple’s son, Chris.
This just got real.
Mister Fitzwilliam sometimes felt as if his life was all one long, big, convoluted, adjective-burdened, uncomfortably strained, self-referential analogy.
Excellent! I mean, horrible!
It was the inference he’d drawn from the inferrer’s implication–which is to say, it was implicatively inferred, as opposed to inferentially implied–or, rather, that is, stated, as we say sometimes, “in a roundabout” (or circumlucotory) way–that prompted Edwin R. Minglesworry to muse this aloud in a wondering fashion (as distinct from the earlier, less-aloud (or even silent, as some might call it) fashion of his wonderings from just-the-moment-previous): “What”–and this was said in such a way as to be heavily-loaded with just the same sort of inferences that make a statement fraught with the sorts of meanings that you can’t just come right out and SAY–”are you implying?”
Thumbs up for any sentence that makes me dizzy. Bonus points for the Edward Gorey-esque name.
Dan Brown, a forty-one year old man with an important job relating to the events at hand, strode manfully into the room, noticing one or two pieces of its decoration, and carrying a large gun of a very specific make and model, prepared to solve a mystery involving obscure historical references and stupid New Age conspiracy theories.
I like this one because “manfully.”
You have an eye for bad sentences. Have you ever considered… composing one?
Wow. I feel like I’ve opened some kind of portal.
I hereby submit everything that I have ever posted to Twitter, except for the retweets which I bequeath to Mister provided that he spends one night in my haunted blog.
Wait, what’s happening here? Are there two Joshes AND two Kellys?
When I was in college, to allay this type of confusion my friends referred to me as “Sexy Josh” and the other guy was “Unsexy Josh.” So we can just go with that.
Oh, and the plural of “Josh” is not “Joshes.” It’s “Reginald.”
It’s confusing.
I hereby submit everything that I have ever posted on Twitter, excepting the retweets which I bequeath to Mister, provided that he shall spend one night within my haunted blog.
Whoops, sorry for the double. My browser told me the captcha wasn’t recognized.
OK, you challenged me. So remember, you have no one to blame but yourself…
“Her eyes throbbed with desire, and filled with the hot sting of passionate tears, which she longed to give free passage down her flushed, pulsating cheeks.”
I’m a little misty-eyed, but I don’t know if it’s from emotion or revulsion. Excellent!
Pulsating cheeks! Perhaps her alien love is within her.
Here you go…. my best bad effort.
Deep within her, the beautiful if slightly rumpled Kitty Von Hizzenfoote felt the deep rumblings of a vaguely familiar feeling; whether fitful flatulence provoked by the night of frenzied feeding for love gone bad, or the resonating rumble of remorse for how she had treated Jeremy afterwards (the loving, screaming, the incident with the cherries and the pits and the glow of the embers, his face, red as love, red as fire, blistered and burnt), she didn’t know, couldn’t tell, wouldn’t say, even as she pondered the cruel new day in the bleak gray light cast through the bars of the Winnamucca City Jail cell.
I feel like this could also be entered into “Worst of More Bad Very Short Stories”!
These are all just terrible–I salute you!
Keep them coming. I can see letting this drag on for weeks.
This sentence came from my *romance* novel. Which didn’t sell. Can’t figure why.
He rolled off her, pulled up his pants, and smoothed his moustache.
Is it possible that a sentence could be the worst of more bad sentences, but also the most perfect sentence ever written?
Oh, it’s so perfectly bad! And romantic, too.
This one is also from the romance novel. Gosh, I just can’t figure why my agent didn’t find this guy a total sexpot:
His neck was crimped from where he’d tried to angle it comfortably in his reading chair, his left hand was asleep, and his mouth tasted like old socks.
It was the fourth time Edward Buffins had hidden like a mouse in the bushes of his apartment, waiting for his neighbor Diana Dufrane to sprint spryly by on her morning run, and as he sat cross-legged, waiting, he savored the recollection of her firm breasts swinging to and fro like two fleshy, synchronized pendulums.
These entries are the result of a group writing session on my patio:
Raj (my bro) -
Her gold toerings caught a glimmer of sunlight, attracting the men like the sound of a mariachi-broadcasting ice cream truck draws children to the sidewalk on a moist summer Sunday night.
Emily (his betrothed) -
The june bug sat on her face, its buggy body bouncing like a fat guy on a trampoline.
Maya (me) -
The night was not young, and ether was either the grace or curse of that Wednesday’s ending, which the alcohol ads did NOT prepare her for; Grace would later point out that it was a huge pictorial success, but, as everyone could plainly see, an abysmal chemical failure wherever ethoxyethane was concerned.
Clint (my husband) -
If you read it, you think it’s really depressing – it’s a tale of woe – but then it gets worse, and then when you think it can’t get any worse, it gets worser – and then it gets really bad.
Maya, Emily, and Raj -
Experience tells me, more than my age-addled Aunt Agnes, that men are like cheese – with age generally comes a fuzzy variety of mold.
Emily, Clint, Maya, and Raj –
Her rose tattoos peeked out from her ample cleavage as she playfully pulled out a copy of Grilling for Dummies and winked knowingly at her common-law husband.
The heavens, enwrapped in a pillowcase of inky sorrow, excreted lightning around the
geriatric choking on spaghetti.
This sentence, horrible as it is, may have saved my life last night. I wish there was an additional prize for spaghetti/thunderstorm-related cautionary tales.
And . . . time!
Thank you for all the entries. They are . . . terrible! But which one is the worst?
Winner to be announced tomorrow morning.