Ottawa man wins award for writing a novel’s worst opening line,

Ottawa man picks up prize in international bad-writing contest

Howie McLennon’s literary aspirations are modest, which is probably appropriate since the Ottawa resident has just won a prize in a popular contest that celebrates bad writing.

The federal government employee picked up one of the awards in the annual Edward George Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest (wretched writers welcome), which challenges contestants to write the first sentence of the worst novel ever.

The contest attracts thousands of entrants from around the world. But McLennon edged them all in the “purple prose” category for this excruciatingly bad, hockey-themed line:

“Before they met, his heart was a frozen block of ice, scarred by the skate blades of broken relationships, then she came along and like a beautiful Zamboni flooded his heart with warmth, scraped away the ugly slushy bits, and dumped them in the empty parking lot of his soul.”

McLennon said he was struck by creative inspiration after watching a Zamboni clean the ice before he played a hockey game: “I was trying to think of a really corny line.”

McLennon, 52, is an IT worker for the federal government — “one of those guys who keeps the networks up and running” — and certainly never had dreams of being a great writer.

He doesn’t tend to read novels himself.

And anything he might write would probably automatically qualify “in any of the categories” of a badwriting contest, he says.

But he and his daughters had chuckled in the past over the contest winners, which are widely publicized. McLennon sent off his entry but told no one, even his wife.

He was shocked when he received an email on Sunday saying “congratulations — I guess,” he jokes. “I was pretty happy about it.

“It’s funny, I was telling the guys at work about it, they just couldn’t believe it, they were shaking their heads.”

The contest has been sponsored since 1982 by the English Department at San Jose State University. It’s the evil brainchild of Professor Scott Rice.

As a graduate student, Rice was forced to do a paper on the Victorian novelist Edward George BulwerLytton, who is perhaps best known for writing the opening line: “It was a dark and stormy night ...” That phrase, of course, was made infamous by Snoopy in the Peanuts cartoons.

This year, winners in the contest were selected in nearly a dozen categories, from adventure writing to crime, historical fiction and romance.

The grand prize winner was Chris Wieloch from Brookfield, Wis., for this entry:

“She strutted into my office wearing a dress that clung to her like Saran Wrap to a sloppily butchered pork knuckle, bone and sinew jutting and lurching asymmetrically beneath its folds, the tightness exaggerating the granularity of the suet and causing what little palatable meat there was to sweat, its transparency the thief of imagination.”