Toilet prose wins bad writing contest

THEY'RE funny at first and lighten the heart, like a ray of sunshine, gleaming and sparkling on a perfect mountainous snow-laden landscape although just as the sun's gentle warmth, in caressing the tiny snowflakes, will result in a chilly, unsightly sludge, nature thus destroying its own beauty they too will become irksome and ugly to contemplate.

So the secret in reading the winning entries from this year's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest also known as the Bad Writing, or Dark and Stormy Night Contest is to take them just a few at a time. One glance at the overall winner and you'll understand why.

"On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained."

That tortured gem was proudly penned by Ms Rephah Berg of California, now a distinguished two-time winner, having scooped last year's detective category with the following entry: "The graphic crime-scene photo that stared up at Homicide Inspector Chuck Venturi from the centre of his desk was not a pretty picture, though it could have been, Chuck mused, had it only been shot in soft focus with a shutter speed of 1/125 second at f5.6 or so."

Held annually since 1982 in honour of the Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton , the contest challenges entrants to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels.

It is fitting that such an accolade be bestowed upon the man who, although best known for the phrase, "the pen is mightier than the sword", famously opened his novel, Paul Clifford (1830), with the immortal words: "It was a dark and stormy night."

Most category winners came from the US but writers from Brazil, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand also featured in the honours.