A celebration of bad writing
You have to be good to write bad. Excuse me, I meant to type “badly” there. Or did I? I’m not sure anymore. I’ve just spent hours combing through the entries to the Bad Writing Contest, an old Pittsburgh newspaper tradition that I’ve resurrected after a 29year hiatus.
Sometimes something is so bad it’s good, like “Plan 9 From Outer Space” or “Dolemite” or Necco Wafers. When I put out the call to readers, tens were elated.
“Thank your for re-instituting the Bad Writing Contest,” Roy Kim of West View wrote. “I miss it terribly, even though I have no recollection of it ever existing.”
A veritable plethora (nearly all plethoras are “veritable,” I’ve noticed) of poorly practiced prose poured propitiously from Pennsylvania. I felt like a man holding a single plastic bag and trying to clean up after a Kenny Chesney concert.
So I’ve decided to play this exactly like “Jeopardy! Greatest of All Time.” That is, apart from the small difference of our top prize being a million dollars lighter. And that we anticipate 14.4 million fewer viewers.
I will spend several columns presenting the best of the worst I’ve been offered, and will ask you, gentle readers, to email your decisions on who sank most to this occasion. I will then, of course, ignore all votes.
To review the Jan. 5 set-up, I unabashedly ripped off one Jeremy Das, of Loughborough, England, who won the crime/detective prize in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest with this gem:
Realising that his symptoms indicated a virtually undetectable, fast-acting neurotoxin, CIA coroner Quinn Abner frantically wrote up the details, lay on the floor and, as a professional courtesy, did his best to draw a chalk outline of himself.
PG readers were invited to either extend that narrative or come up with a fresh one by Jan. 31. I’ll begin today with readers who chose to build the kind of extension that shouldn’t get an occupancy permit. Please note I have edited entries down to their nubs, confident I only made them worse.
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This rudimentary chalk outline, resembling the route of out-of-town drivers navigating bike lane protocol, did not go well due to his grossly corpulent figure, the shakes of someone coming off a three-day bender on Carson Street, and his alligator arms which incidentally had nothing to do to his parsimonious habits when it came time to pick up a check. (Tim Brown, Deutschtown)
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Quinn was fiercely ambidextrous (he could wax poetic and his Buick simultaneously), but he ran out of chalk. Despondent, he thought of his unemployed neighbor, Tallulah, who had been the meat station attendant at a vegan laundromat. Tallulah was proud of her ham croquettes, which were as perfectly round as bowling balls but lacked finger holes. She intended to bring them to her networking luncheon (the croquettes, not the balls) and it worked: Marvin hired Tallulah as a teller for PNC. Becoming an expert at serving lattes through those late fees, Tallulah rocketed through the fiberglass ceiling (the elimination of glass having prevented millions of female head lacerations) by becoming Head Teller at the PNC branch inside a Sewickley pawn shop. Emboldened by her new PNC title, Tallulah petitioned the courts to change her last name to “Bankhead.” And the rest is Hollywood history, dahling. (Dale Abraham, North Side)
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Chalk! Sweet, white, delicious chalk. The chalk brought to mind thoughts of childhood, and the many hours Quinn had spent volunteering to clap erasers together in Mrs. Applebaum’s first-grade classroom, which had 18 children in it, up until his best friend, Gregory, was maimed in the sledding accident. After that, the class had only 17 kids in it. “Anyway, what is it about chalk?”, Quinn chuckled to himself as he lay writhing in agony. Was it the smell of chalk that summoned this flood of memories, which were as vivid as the HD picture on the new 55-inch Samsung television that Quinn had just installed over the holidays? Or was it the fact that, at 21, 14 years to the day after the sledding accident, in that very same dust-scented classroom, he had lost his virginity to a newlydivorced Mrs. Applebaum? (Bill Toland, Baldwin borough)
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As he removed his shoes and socks and began to self-attach his body tag, Quinn wondered if his pending doom may have been hastened by a deadly holiday disease, like mistletoe, or the return of the ‘50s scourge, toelio. He slid himself into the freezer compartment like a Japanese salaryman squeezing into a Capsule hotel, and locked the door. As he waited for the neurotoxin and lack of oxygen to kill him, his symptoms subsided and he realized that he’d be dying for no reason. He cried out, but the soundproof freezer made it a mute point. (Jay Lynch, Upper St. Clair)
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That’s enough for now. I will share more again soon, the columnist threatened ominously.