Show the Best of your Worst Writing

[LizW65]

OK, how's this:

"Moonlight, deflected from the crescent orb that floated weightlessly like a tiny ship lost in the vast inky ocean that is space, glinted off jeweled harness, illuminated pale, stern faces 'neath steel helmets, and washed feebly o'er the nametags fixed firmly to each mailed breast; Cliche, Purple Prose, Bad Sequel, and Plagiarism put spurs to their mighty steeds and reared up as one, bellowing a battle-cry that no mortal ear could hear, as the Four Horsemen Of The Literary Apocalypse galloped, silent and unheeded, through the deserted library, and the one who is called Daytime Television rode with them."

[Yeratel]

"Moonlight, deflected from the crescent orb that floated weightlessly like a tiny ship lost in the vast inky ocean that is space, glinted off jeweled harness, illuminated pale, stern faces 'neath steel helmets, and washed feebly o'er the nametags fixed firmly to each mailed breast; Cliche, Purple Prose, Bad Sequel, and Plagiarism put spurs to their mighty steeds and reared up as one, bellowing a battle-cry that no mortal ear could hear, as the Four Horsemen Of The Literary Apocalypse galloped, silent and unheeded, through the deserted library, and the one who is called Daytime Television rode with them."

As they round the turn at Self Help Books going into the back stretch, Purple Prose leads Cliche by a nose, with Daytime TV coming up fast on the outside.

[Josh]

So where's fan fiction's horse?

[meg_evonne]

R U kidding?  Fan-Fic would be in the bar out of the rain & sleet, having a brew and watching the action on the big screen tv!   Belly up to the bar...  Northern Dancer's Secretariat Cigar.  Horse butts passing methane regularly to sweeten the atmosphere and having a RPG game going on the side!   

[Antimatter Girl]

The sad thing is, I am genuinely curious as to how most of these stories would develop o.O

Either I am amused entirely too easily, or some of these are so bad that they're really, in fact, good ^.^

Hooray for camp!

[konstantine23]

I won't contribute, but please keep this up. It seriously made my whole friggin day fun.  . Seriously. The Whole. Friggin. Day.

[Josh]

I'm going to post a worst-written line that I heard read at a conference...I don't remember who originally wrote it, otherwise I'd give credit...


"His muscles bulged and twitched like a hoard of hamsters all humping one another beneath a tightly stretched canvas."


And there you have it.

[King of De Nile]

Of course, for really, truly bad writing, there's no topping "The Eye of Argon." Any story that can consistently have you read a sentence and still have no idea what it's saying is gold in the "Best of the Worst" category.

[LizW65]

Here's a link to The Eye of Argon if anyone wants to take a look:
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/sf/eyeargon/eyeargon.htm
It truly is a "classic".

I believe the hamster line was a runner-up in the Bulwer-Lytton contest (no idea what year, though.)

[Yeratel]

If you grew up learning good writing habits, striving for clarity and conciseness, and following The Elements of Style, then it's hard to throw it all out the window and write bad without a deliberate effort.
The defenestration of good style, good taste, good grammar, good spelling, and good sense just comes naturally to some folks, though, as illustrated by many examples posted on the various fanfic web sites. There may be the occasional nugget in there someplace, but it's unfortunately hidden in a vast slush pile of mostly adolescent drivvel. The Eye of Argon is definitely a gold nugget.

[Antimatter Girl]

I'm going to post a worst-written line that I heard read at a conference...I don't remember who originally wrote it, otherwise I'd give credit...


"His muscles bulged and twitched like a hoard of hamsters all humping one another beneath a tightly stretched canvas."


And there you have it.

Now, see, I don't see that as bad writing. I see that as well-crafted cheese, extremely vivid and horrendously ludicrous all at the same time. It took a sick and twisted imagination to come up with that metaphor ^.^

The Eye of Argon, however, from what little I could manage to read, is bad. It isn't funny, or clever, just tedious.