Sticks
& Stones
Join the Pack:
Granted, it is a fulsomely salutary experience to parody bad writing, to
comment on The Sad State Of Literacy by composing deliberate travesties of literary
ineptitude. That is what the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is all about (that
and the universal improvement of mankind). But how can people of our kidney
rest there? The cause of enlightenment--the promotion of clear, effective
communication and the future of civilization itself--demands that we take a
more direct and muscular approach. It demands that we move from generalities to
specifics. It demands that we rattle the cages of the offending scribes.
The aforesaid having been said, we propose a new pastime for Bulwervians
everywhere. We the custodians, guardians, and stewards of the Bulwer-Lytton
Fiction Contest propose a new game. We propose that you locate, isolate, and
otherwise identify samples of bad published writing (that is, writing by those
who are paid to write), and that you submit them to this page along with any
commentary you wish to provide.
That is right! We are offering you the opportunity to display your wit and
judgment at someone else's expense, the expense of someone fortunate enough to
be paid to write. With a little luck, you may even threaten someone's
livelihood. If this is not incentive enough, you may at least have the
satisfaction of knowing that you are contributing to An International Dialogue
on Literacy (sniff!).
A few simple guidelines:
You may address any kind of literary
offense, be it (or they) of style or content, but Try to keep your examples
relatively brief, and If you wish, comment on
what you find offensive or amusing (for extra points, you can even use the passage
to point some wholesome, salutary, and constructive lesson about fine
writing). Oh, and because we cannot expect total consensus, we will also
permit responses to your submissions. After all, someone else's fancy may be
tickled by the very thing you loathe, abominate, and even dislike (and
vice-versa). Now, because a few examples are better than a thousand
explanations, we will implement the rotation of the sphere:
[#1]
"She wore a dress the same color as her eyes
her father brought her from San Francisco."
--Danielle Steel, Star
In this case, we are viewing a pristine instance of syntactic incompetence. The
phraseology suggests that her father brought her eyes from San Francisco, not a
dress, although the latter is the writer's obvious intention. You can argue
that sense overrules the word sequencing, but should the reader have to guess
what a professional writer is trying to say ("You said this but you meant
to say that!")? Granted, reading is a participatory act, and every piece
of good writing carries the implicit instructions, "Some assembly
required." Good books demand good readers, even nimble readers. Put
another way, good writing asks the reader to play Ginger Rogers to the writer's
Fred Astaire. Nevertheless, Fred would never signal Ginger that he was doing
the Fox Trot when he was really doing the Funky Chicken.
From
Steel's sentence we learn that clear writing is a matter of effective
sequencing. A sentence, whether it is in a novel or a technical report, is a
sequence of information. Good writing is good sequencing. At least in this
reporter's opinion.
The
word on the street, by the way, is that Danielle does not actually
"write" her books. She dictates them to a tape recorder, then lets
someone else type them up. Apparently, to borrow what Hemingway said of
Gertrude Stein, revision is an activity that gives her no pleasure.
[Contributor:
Scott Rice, San Jose, CA]
[#2]
I was reading - attempting to read - a book over the weekend which brought Dark
and Stormy to mind. The majority of sentences are over 60 words. Picked at
random are a few shorter sentences for your interest.
a) "He spun round in the doorway with a
violence that was tangible, surveying her bitterly with hard, blazing eyes
before banging the door so savagely that the whole room shuddered and whimpered
before sinking into an unearthly silence."
b) "They had only known each other for the
last four months, Claire having come to work at the surgery following a long
spell in hospital after a severe road accident, but the two of them had
immediately hit it off." (Apart from this enlightening entry Claire
has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the book.)
c) "The possessiveness in his voice was deep
and strong, its triumphant throb cutting through the layers of sexual delight
as thoroughly as a knife through warm butter, and it hit her like a deluge of
cold water."
d) "Donato nodded in a sharp little bow,
clicking his fingers at Antonio, who reached behind her for the case, his
pock-marked face beneath its chauffeur's cap of blue and gold apologetic."
e) "The fifty-or-so-mile drive to Donato's
magnificent villa in Sorrento would be no problem - the Mercedes' excellent air
conditioning added to the fact that the late-April temperature was only just
touching seventy degrees made travelling at midday still a pleasure, unlike in
high summer - but sitting in close proximity to Donato for well over an hour
was a different matter."
--Helen Brooks, Husband by Contract (Harlequin)
[Contributor:
Su Irons, Auckland, New Zealand]
[#3]
Your new "Sticks & Stones" category wouldn't be complete without
mentioning Norman Mailer's misplaced modifier in the first line of
"Harlot's Ghost" (Random House, 1991), the first novel to cost more
than $30, which began:
"On a late winter evening in 1983, while
driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began
to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the
Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago."
The pundits had a field day with this one, correctly inquiring as to how
"recollections" could "drive." It also inspired my own BLFC
entry as follows:
"Driving along the main coastline, my recollections clasped the leather stickshift
of my 91 Harlotte and shoved it into overdrive, catapulting the lengthy vehicle
past three ten-spots; past a random house; and finally past the limits of
Hyperbole, into the uncharted depths beyond."
[Contributor:
Chuck Myer, Colfax, CA (1997 BLFC Western runner-up)]
[#4]
No, he looked like a compassionate rapist.
"Anthony Rowley didn't look like a
self-confessed sadistic rapist."
--Sarah Lovett, Acquired Motives
I was at the check-out counter at the grocery store and happened to pick this
up. I know a good opening sentence is supposed to grab the reader, but where?
The implied formula here seems to be: sensationalism=good writing. I want a
little more subtlety in my reading, something that assumes I have some brains
and an attention span.
[Contributor:
Gene M., Yakima, Washington]
[#5]
"Why do nuts women always have cats? Why not dogs, dogs who
are just as excited to see you after you drive up to the corner to get milk as
they were when they first met you, instead of cats, who, as Pat always said, regarded
people as warm-blooded furniture? To keep her eyes to herself, Beth stared down
at Loreta's ample thigh in its armor of polyester, a blue that did not exist in
nature. Why did nuts women aged about sixty-five who kept cats also wear
stretch pants? With flowered blouses that looked chosen carefully for their
potential to make the wearer look like ten miles of bad road under a
tablecloth? Because something like these clothes had looked good on them when
they were young? Because everything else looked worse? As she let her glance
slide upward to Loretta's tightly furled perm, like a head of late-spring buds,
she heard the woman ask Candy, "So, do you want me to do a trance? Or just
give you some impressions?"
--Jacquelyn
Mitchard, The Deep End of the Ocean (p. 106)
The Commentary: You'll have to
pardon me for such a lengthy submittal, but rest assured that I omitted the
first part of the paragraph which, in its entirety, might in itself contain
enough exemplary material for an entire course in how not to write. The
sentence fragments. Since when did "nuts" become an adjective? We're
all just lucky that the author didn't enter this material in the BLFC, or we
would all be one step lower in the rankings. At least.
[Contributor: Larry Sherman,
Fremont, California]
[#6]
And this," Pauline continued, indicating the
largest of the three men, "is Mr. Earl. He's your security guard, and
he'll shadow you until the jewels are returned all in one piece."
Laura smiled charmingly at the beefy young guard, whose massive shoulders and
biceps threatened to split the seams of his rented dinner jacket.
"'Ello, Miss," he said, politely touching his forehead with a finger
in a kind of salute. "It's a right 'onor. 'Course, my old mum an' I, we
seen all yer pictures. She's a great fan 'o yers, is me mum"
--Joan Collins, Hell Hath No Fury (unpublished)
This is my favorite excerpt from the unpublished oeuvre of actress/author(?) Joan
Collins. The work was never published because Random House, with whom she had a
contract to write two books, alleged that the manuscript she delivered, Hell
Hath No Fury, was unusable and sued her for the return of their advance.
[Contributor:
Jeff Vorzimmer, Austin]
[#7]
With little fanfare, in 1988 or 1989, possibly the worst written book ever
published came out. Zebra press, known for its "Men's Adventure"
novels, released Bodysmasher by Jan Stacy. The premise gave notice of how
bad it was to be; something to the effect of "Not only is Rick Harrison
the world's best professional wrestler, he's also the CIA's most top secret
operative."
Despite
touching on just about every cheesy cliché from the mad scientist who wants to
destroy the world, to the evil Russian wrestler who kills people in the ring
(hey, it was the cold war still!!) and, of course, the mysterious Asian
spiritual mentor, this classic gave us such literary gems as: "She wanted to wrap her legs around him the way a tree
wraps itself around a mountain" and the ever popular "She rode astride him like a bucking bronco in the
rodeo of the flesh."
[Contributor:
Colin Fisk, Fremont, CA]
[#8]
"He was as guarded as a virgin, but infinitely
more experienced."
This,
um, remarkable statement refers to the heroic Irish terrorist Seaneen O'Sullivan
in Cathy Cash Spellman's novel An Excess of Love. In truth, I found this
book, which follows the fortunes of two sisters around the time of Ireland's
Easter Rising in 1916, very entertaining. I even picked up a little history.
However, it's been at least five years since I read An Excess of Love,
and I still remember how I howled with laughter upon reading this line, which,
when taken in context, does not appear to have anything to do with Seaneen's
sex life.
[Contributor:
Kate Nagy, Bethesda, MD]
[#9]
The following excerpt is from "The CNE Study Guide" written by David
James Clarke, who attempts an analogy to help better the understanding of the
term "Flow Control" in networking.
"Let's say you're moving to a bigger, better home. You've
been working all day, lugging around boxes, and you're thirsty. Unfortunately,
the soda's on the counter and your hands are full of boxes. So what do you do?
You ask your friend to give you a drink. He or she pours it down your throat
with no sense of when is enough. After a few gulps, you decide you don't want
to drown in Coke and start waving your arms and nodding you head. Your friend
gets the message and stops pouring the drink. This is flow control."
To start with, how can one wave their arms if they're full. That's what
prompted this stupid analogy in the first place. Next, if they started nodding
their head, the soda would be spilling all over the place. Not a pretty
picture. But, let's face it, this whole scenario could be elevated if this
person just had enough sense to put the boxes down and get the drink on their
own. Some people are just lazy.
[Contributor:
Wallace Frost, Media, PA]
[#10]
As you may know, the New York Times began this very week to publish
color photographs in the Living Arts Section. One must occassionally accept
such clumsy lurches into the modern era. However, lurking behind the visual
gloss was an even more menacing species of written dross. The following was
excerpted from the Op. Ed. page of today's NYT. Both great art and great crap
routinely defy description, so I present them unadorned without the handicap of
my own ornate, brocade, reticulated, spiffy commentary. These are just a few of
my favorite passages. True Bulwerians will wish to relish the whole tamale.
"Rising from some elusive and overwrought part of the
equatorial sea at least five degress hotter than it's supposed to be, El Nino
is a mysterious U.F.O. of rain and wind thousands of miles wide hovering
mysteriously out in the Pacific, the monstrous meteorological butterfly that
flaps its wings on the other side of the world and gives you a balmy winter in
Manhattan."
"Tremulous hopes of Pacific disaster spring eternal in the
East Coast hearts. We know this; you hate us; it's O.K. In the Moment of the
Held Breath (author's long shorthand for California) we've lived with the
resentment of the age as routinely as we live with the news of El Nino because,
as old hands at apocalypse, our own particular narcissism is such that we not
only expect El Nino, but we also hope for it."
"Living in California, we define ourselves by chaos; the pending
cataclysm, whatever it might be at any given moment, reminds us who we are. As
with the house I live in [note: author describes it as "launching out from
a hillside and over a chasm below, away from the land and into the air."]
the very occupation of California--a fractured, partially liquefied terrain of
arid deserts, hostile mountains, dense woods and craggy seashores--is an act of
recklessness, it's motivated by both the hubris of transcendence and the
rapture of self-annihilation. More than merely believing we're the only ones
who actually deserve El Nino, we need (author italicizes 'need'). Take our
apocalypse from us, and we are nothing."
And
finally . . .
"As it happens, maternity wards report that veritable
monsoons of babies are born during storms and full moons, and since our kid's
due date coincides not only with the the rains but with the full moon as well,
we're preparing for him to come blowing out of my wife in such a gust that it
will take the combined efforts of doctors, nurses, midwives, orderlies,
physical therapists, security guards, parking attendants and previously
comatose patients to lash the little sucker down. He will be an El Nino baby
lit with demon moonlight, a child of chaos like the rest of us, counting down
the minutes to the end of the world like the drops of rain that would wash us
away."
--Steve Erickson, "Cloudy, Chance of Annihilation"
"El
Nino" is colloquial Spanish for the Christ Child. Heaven help us, writing
like this must be a sin.
[Contributor:
John Ormsby, Berkeley]
[#11]
Lytton
was not the only bad writer of his day, not by a long shot. As a mangler of
prose, he had plenty of company. One group of purple prose artists was featured
in "The Lily Series," a stream of wholesome novels spewed forth on
both sides of the Atlantic. The publishers explained their morally uplifting
(and doubtlessly lucrative) mission this way:
"The design of this Series is to include no books except
such as are peculiarly adapted by their high tone, pure taste, and thorough
principles to be read by those persons, young and old, who look upon books as
upon their friends--only worthy to be received into the Family Circle for their
good qualities and excellent characters. In view of this design, no author
whose name is not a guarantee of the real worth of his or her work or whose
book has not been subject to rigid examination, will be admitted into the 'Lily
Series.'"
By
the time Faith Gartney's Girlhood was released in the series, seventy-eight
titles had displayed sufficient "high tone, pure taste, and thorough
principles" to pass the publisher's "rigid examination." Among
the classics of the series were Quinnebasset Girls, How Marjorie
Helped, and Madeleine: A Story of French Love (which couldn't have
been as interesting as the title sounds). As for the stylistic standards, well,
they were downright Lyttonian:
"East or West, it matters not where--the story may,
doubtless, indicate something of the latitude and longitude as it proceeds--in
the city of Mishaumok, lived Henderson Gartney, Esq., one of those American
gentlemen of whom, if she were ever canonized, Martha of Bethany must be the
patron saint--if again, feminine celestials, sainthood once achieved through
the weary experience of earth, don't know better than to assume such charge of
wayward man--born, as they are, seemingly, to the life-destiny of being ever
'careful and troubled about many things.'"
--Adeline Dutton Whitney, Faith Gartney's Girlhood,
1863
Whitney's mortal pen also gave those
"who look upon books as upon their friends" A Summer in Leslie
Goldthwaite's Life."
[Contributor: Stanley Perks, Boca
Raton, Florida]
[#12]
Herewith two actually published
snippets. The first is from the recently published The Atonement and Other
Stories Louis Auchincloss; it's the opening sentence of the story "Ars
Gratia Artis", and comes as close to Paulcliffordism as anything I've
seen. (Perhaps Auchincloss aspires to a Bulwer laureateship?) The second is the
opening of a godawful Victorian novel, The History of Sir Richard Calmady :
A Romance, by Lucas Malet.
"Living in the past is constantly derided, particularly
by those who like to pride themselves on being abreast, if not actually ahead
of, the passing moment, but there comes a time in life for some of us, alas,
when it seems the only place where we can live; and that is certainly the case
of an infirm and antiquated bachelor living alone (except for a loyal caretaker
and an uncertain cleaning woman) in his old family stone gentilhommie`re
(I'm sorry; I like the French term) on the Yorkshire moors."
"In that fortunate hour of English history, when the
cruel sights and haunting insecurities of the Middle Ages had passed away, and
while, as yet, the fanatic zeal of Puritanism had not cast its blighting shadow
over all merry and pleasant things, it seemed good to one Denzil Calmady,
esquire, to build himself a stately red-brick and freestone house upon the
southern verge of the great plateau of moorland which ranges northward to the
confines of Windsor Forest and eastward to the Surrey Hills. And this he did in
no vainglorious spirit, with purpose of exalting himself above the county
gentlemen, his neighbours, and showing how far better lined his pockets were than
theirs. Rather did and comely, and as the natural outgrowth of an inquiring and
philosophic mind.
[Contributor:
Fr. John Woolley, Denver]
COMMENT: This is a
first-person narration. Would you criticize Marlon Brando for Stanley Kowalski's
speech? [Or Tennessee Williams?]
Dennis
Mahony : dmahony@prodigy.net
[#13]
"Actually, you might say that it's more accurately been
a battle between warring factions of fans who, for more than 30 years, have
chosen sides, gathered behind the flapping banners of either the Mustang or
Camaro, and proceeded to cross swords at virtually every drag strip and
roadrace course in the country (as well as any intersection with a red light
that eventually turns reen)."
--Guy Spangenberg, "Ford SVT Mustang Cobra vs. Chevrolet
Camaro Z28", Road and Track, November, 1997.
[Contributor:
Greg George, Cincinnati, Ohio]
[#14]
"Trying to diffuse the crisis, Secretary General Kofi
Annan offered yesterday to send a mission to Iraq to defuse the crisis."
The
above appeared under a Reuters and New York Times byline in an article
published in the Toronto Globe and Mail. It deals with Sadaam Hussein's refusal
to allow Americans to be part of a UN weapons inspection team. Apparently, Mr.
Annan wants others to share in the U.S.'s problem by spreading it around.
[Contributor:
Boris Krivy, Toronto]
[#15]
Every
time I go to the library, I like to get out a few books by authors I have never
heard of, just to make sure I'm not missing out on good books merely because they
aren't well known. Occasionally, this effort turns up gold. Frequently,
however, it brings me into contact with authors whose obscurity is eminently
justifiable. The most recent example of that kind had me worried when I
encountered the following line in the first paragraph:
"She popped the elastic at the top of the second sock
and pushed her sexually ambiguous Timed watch up along the blond hairs of her
handsome forearms."
--POB2, A Love Story, Steve Whalen
First - Sexually ambiguous watch? I have yet to meet a watch whose gender I
could not identify - they don't have one. Or perhaps Mr. Whalen means the watch
is attracted to both men and women? Second - A semi-reasonable meaning can
eventually be grasped for the above, at least after wading through some of the
more vivid images the odd phrase brings to mind, but what on earth does the
verb "popped" mean in this context? What precisely is she doing with
her second sock? Third - Why does NEARLY EVERY NOUN have an at least one
adjective? Do we really need to be informed, all in the same sentence, that it
was the "second" sock and a "sexually ambiguous" watch and
there were "blond" hairs on her "handsome" forearms? This
trend is continued throughout the book - in the next paragraph, she straightens
a comforter her grandmother made, and as she stares at the "antique"
headboard and "fading" bedspread she can see the "gentle,
arthritic" hands of the "old" woman etc., etc., etc. Part of bad
writing is an uncanny knack for choosing the wrong word - the word that doesn't
quite mean what the author wants, or makes the sentence cliche, or is odd
without being interesting, or boringly repetitive, or just plain wildly
inappropriate. This author, in a very short space, has managed all of those -
an impressive achievement.
In addition, the sex scenes in the novel are among the most boring I have ever
read in my life.
[Contributor:
Jeffry Herman, Somerville, MA.]
[#16]
" Even before the deal with Straker had been consummated
(that's some word all right, he thought, and his eyes crawled over the front of
his secretary's blouse), Lawrence Crockett was, without doubt, the richest man
in 'Salem's Lot and one of the richest in Cumberland County, although there was
nothing about his office or his person to indicate it."
This
comes from Stephen King's novel Salem's Lot, and for me, the imagery of
those happy little eyeballs is a bit startling to say the least!
[Contributor:
Kaye Bellot, Modesto, CA]
[#17]
"Eighteen years ago, on the night of her eighth birthday,
in a seaside cottage on Key West, Chyna had squirmed under her bed to hide from
Jim Woltz, her mother's friend. A storm had been raging from the Gulf of
Mexico, and the sky-blistering lightning had made her fearful of scaping to the
sanctuary of the beach where she'd retreated on other nights. After committing
herself to the cramped space under that iron bed, which had been lower slung
that this one, she had discovered that she was sharing it with a palmetto
beetle. Palmettos were not as exotic or as pretty as their name. In fact, they
were nothing more than enormous tropical cockroaches."
-- Dean Koontz, Intensity
Frankly,
this passage frightens me on a number of levels.
[Contributor:
Jordan J. Earl, Asheville, NC]
[#18]
Am
I overreacting? The first sentence of chapter one reads:
By the end of the alley the fine hairs in my
nostrils were starting to twitch.
Lindsey Davis, Shadows in Bronze
[Contributor
?]
[#19]
I am still trying to interpret this!
"Having had time to think it over, Andrew had decided that
he did not believe in this for a moment. If he had not been so unfortunate at different
times during the last few years as to become involved in the solution of a
murder or two, so that he was more inclined than he would have been before he
had been drawn into that rather gruesome activity to think that his own wild
guesses were sometimes perhaps to be taken seriously, he would not even have
considered such a possibility."
-- E X Ferrars, A Murder Too Many
[Contributor:
Sue D'Arcy, Northern Territory, Australia]
[#20]
On
October 17, 1997 Matt Hayes of the Jacksonville Times Union wrote:
"The son called his mother two days ago, hundreds
of miles and two countries separating a voice of anticipation."
The son was Jesse Palmer a University of Florida quarterback; his mother lives
in Canada. Would those two countries be Michigan and Wisconsin?
[Contributor:
Bill Weldon, Bell, FL]
[#21]
This
San Jose Mercury News writer, Patrick May, has definable talent. He
should visit your classes and describe the manner in which he develops his
purple prose. The following was in the Sunday paper (January 18, 1998):
"Shrouded in Winder fog, trapped in the gullies of the
Mother Lode, the ghosts of a thousand mining camps toss in a fitful slumber.
Down in Dead Mule Cañon, up on Chicken-Thief Flat, the pick and shovel clang in
muffled knell. A century and a half after that first golden glint caught James
Marshall's eye, after the lust and liquor scattered lost souls over every hill
and hollow, these foothills still tremble."
He
continues, "The Gold Rush wsa the largest mass
migration in American history. It ws the champagne bottle smashed over
California's bow."
[Contributor:
Rick Sherman, San Jose, CA]
[#22]
I
would like to introduce you to Ms. Sally Small, the video review columnist for
the San Antonio Express-News, which is the only English-language daily paper in
the area.
Ms.
Small writes in a misspelled stream-of-consciousness style that, while probably
intended to be chatty, mostly comes off as schizophrenic. She leaps from one
incoherent phrase to the next, springing random unprovoked attacks on
"liberal" celebrities. Religious holidays are an excuse for orgies of
Christian prosyletizing. She recently informed her readers that a certain Asian
actor resembled Number Two Son from the Charlie Chan movies.
Eventually,
after an entire page of this drivel, she offhandedly gets around to mentioning
the video that was the purported reason for her miserable column in the first
place. Here's the best part: The people she's attacked in her column are
usually NOT EVEN IN the video being reviewed!
I
would go on, but words fail me. I'll let the anti-writer speak for herself. I
dunno, maybe YOU can figure out what the hell it is she's trying to say.
"Initiatively offended by this 'prudish remark,' that's
what my friend of the opposite sex wanted to shrug it off as, Al asked me to
elaborate."
"At first, 'Event Horizon' seems to be the regulated sci-fi
thriller."
"But, it's THIS ludicrous episode that calls for the
smelling sauce: ..."
"If that's not enough torture, guess who's skinny again.
Oprah. The sentimental, talk show queen willingly shares her holiday diet
secrets. Hoo, hoo, please spare us. Excuse me, but aren't we looking at a
possible Iraqi situation?"
"Sometimes, cheesy TV writers are fortunate enough to
squeeze the blood out of an egghead's dumb mistakes."
This is the agony we must endure in San Antonio. The damned Hearst press has a
lot to answer for.
[Contributor:
David Bryant, San Antonio]
[#23]
(A
little history: a member of Copyediting-L, a list server for copy editors,
submitted the following for comment:
This
opening paragraph appeared in a news story in the Boston Globe. Does anyone
else think it sounds as if Louise Woodward handled the baby while the polygraph
examiner was interviewing her?
Louise Woodward, who will appeal to the state's Supreme Judicial
Court to dismiss her manslaughter conviction next month, apparently
contradicted her sworn testimony about how she handled baby Matthew Eappen
during an interview with a polygraph examiner, according to a review of court
records.
A
number of people suggested corrected versions. What follows is my suggestion.
I'll warn you that a number of people on the list, particularly those from
Britain and New Zealand, were terrifically offended by this offering. On the
other hand, a lot of people loved it, and a couple of them recommended I send
it along to you.)
Louise Woodward leaned back in her chair like an Eskimo sliding
into in a hot tub, a cigar clamped in her teeth like a walleye in a mousetrap.
The laugh that escaped from her throat was half purr, half growl, and as warm
as San Antonio in August, but behind those silty blue lashes her eyes were as
cold as a hospitalization insurance claim reviewer's heart. With a murmur of
silk, she crossed one leg over the other, and the needle on my polygraph wasn't
the only thing that jumped. Later on, in court, she would deny it, but the way
she kept tossing that baby from hand to hand gave it away: Ms Ice Maiden was as
nervous as a nun at a nudist camp. Smoke curled around her shoulders like a
ferret. Cuban cigar smoke. This babe wasn't kidding when she said she was
friends with the pope.
[Contributor:
Kristine Batey, Northwestern University]
[#24]
This
is from a student publication which, unfortunately, I lost. This
"novel" was one of those overwrought fantasy deals where there's an
eternal struggle between the angelic blond brother, the "Light One,"
and his demonic, black-haired twin, "the Dark One." Light hair? Dark
Hair? Twins? You mean the way Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny De Vito are
twins? This guy needed a continuity assistant big time, since on one page, a
sword would be iron, and on the next, gold. He also wrote such gems as, "The dark trees crouched on the barren
landscape."
But
the sentence that I will take to the grave is this one: "His priest-blessed sword was forged in the boiling feces of the
Damned."
It's
a classic.
[Contributor:
Amy Bown, Rochester]
[#25]
Bad
published writing? My own personal accolade (?) goes to the novelization of Murder
By Death, a wonderfully funny movie (with a notably good script by Neil Simon)
which was unfortunately given to some fellow named Henry Keating to do with as
he pleased. A few excerpts from the first chapter:
"Lionel Twain, eighteenth richest man in the world--no,
sorry, seventeenth: reports have just come in of the unfortunate decease of the
current No. 17, who had triplet heirs--the seventeenth richest man in
the world, flung the book he had just finished all the way from one end of his
library to the other."
Which
is what I felt like doing to Murder By Death. If there is one thing
Strunk, White, and I agree on, it's keeping to a single tense unless there's a
damn reason not to.
"In the viewing room at No. 22 Lionel Twain watched the
three of them set out, Dick carrying his martini bravely before him, Dora
hugging her wow of a dress closely around her--not that it was possible for it
to be much closer in most places--and Myron trotting along at the end of his
leash. Inspired perhaps by Dick's noble example, Twain rang for Benson and a
large martini, with olive."
I
will give him points for parallel structure. Not many, but a few.
"'What a godforsaken spot to get lost,' she
drawled, her cheerfulness not having been kept even at simmering point by
frequent applications of alcohol."
Um?
"Only his clothes were not the epitome of Old China,
consisting as they did of a dark suit of conservative cut, a good thick topcoat
of guaranteed antifog qualities with a solid black derby to keep the cold from
the all-important head area."
Even
aside from the puzzling question of how the derby was attached to the topcoat,
this just scares me.
Another
book presumably written on controlled substances and printed by close relatives
of the author: Simon Hawke's The Ambivalent Magician. The author places
himself into the narrative and concludes somewhat hastily (though none too
soon) with a note from his psychiatrist, stating that he has had a nervous
breakdown from the resulting existential paradoxes. I nearly had one too, but
that should be construed as no compliment. The worst cop-out ending since "Then I woke up--it had all been a horrible
dream--or HAD IT???"
[Contributor:
Lindsay Jones, Iowa City]
[#26]
This
comes from a 1927 edition of The Princess and the Goblin, by George
Macdonald.
"One very wet day, when the mountain was covered with mist
which was constantly gathering itself together into rain-drops, and pouring down
on the roofs of the great old house, whence it fell in a fringe of water from
the eaves all around it, the princess could not of course go out. She got very
tired, so tired that even her toys could no longer amuse her. You would wonder
at that if I had time to describe to you one half of the toys she had. But then
you wouldn't have the toys themselves, and that makes all the difference; you
can't get tired of a thing before you have it. It was a picture, though, worth
seeing--the princess sitting in the nursery with the sky-ceiling over her head,
at a great table covered with her toys. If the artist would like to draw this,
I should advise him not to meddle with the toys. I am afraid of attempting to
describe them, and I think he had better not try to draw them. He had better
not. He can do a thousand things I can't, but I don't think he could draw those
toys. No man could better make the princess herself than he could, though--
leaning with her back bowed into the back of the chair, her head banging down,
and her hands in her lap, very miserable as she would say herself, and not even
knowing what she would like, except to go out and get very wet, catch a
particularly nice cold, and have to go to bed and take gruel. The next moment
after you see her sitting there, her nursegoes out of the room."
Why
does this author feel it is so important that he tell us, several times, that
he is writing this story for us to read? Do we really need to know this?
[Kate
Johnston, Sunnyvale, CA]
[#27]
I
would like to propose a new category for entertainment of the masses, College
Course Catalog Copy, and offer a real entry as an example:
127Q-128Q. General Chemistry
Either
semester. Four credits. Three class periods and one 3-hour laboratory period.
(Students who have passed CHEM 137 or 153 may take CHEM 128.) (Students who
have passed CHEM 122 will receive only 2 credits for CHEM 127 but 4 credits
will be used for calculating QPR scores. A student who has a very high standing
in CHEM 122 may be permitted, with the consent of the instructor, to take CHEM
128 without 127.) CHEM 127 is not open for credit to students who have passed
CHEM 129 or 137 or 153; and CHEM 128 is not open to students who have passed
CHEM 130 or 138 or 154.
This course is designed to provide a foundation for more
advanced courses in chemistry. The topics covered include the atomic theory,
the laws and theories concerning the physical and chemical behavior of gases,
liquids, solids, and solutions. The properties of some of the more familiar
elements and their compounds are discussed. The laboratory work in the first
semester involves quantitative measurements illustrating the laws of chemical
combination . In the second semester particular attention is given to
equilibrium in solutions and to the qualitative reactions of the common cations
and anions.
May
this inspire the creative juices of more curriculum committees.
[Contributor:
Dr. Thomas R. Burkholder, Department of Chemistry, Central Connecticut State
University]
[#28]
From
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy. The heroine is in trouble:
"Oh, think! think! think! of what she should do."
"Wait! wait! wait! how long?"
"No! No! No! No! Oh, God in heaven! this cannot be!"
All
sentences occur within two pages.
Despite
her inability to articulate extreme fear, Baroness Orczy remains a shining
example of what you can accomplish with a self-indulgent, overwritten prose
style -- but a great plot.
[Contributor:
Lee Clinch, San Francisco]
[#29]
I
can't claim responsibility for discovering this sentence; I merely found it on
a web site of a fan of the author, and have not had the opportunity to see the
book. However, this particular sentence so closely resembled a Bulwer-Lytton
contest entry that I felt an obligation to warn Dr. Rice of this author's
existence, lest anyone should attempt to submit this sentence - or another from
this author's works - as his own.
For it must be remembered that at the time I knew quite nothing,
naturally, concerning Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney-talking Englishman
with the checkered long-beaked Sherlockholmsian cap; nor of the latter's
"Barr-Bag" which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wienerwurst
is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with her four legs and her six
arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, ex-convict, and son of Dong Chang; nor of the elusive
poetess, Abigail Sprigge; nor of the Great Simon, with his 2163 pearl buttons;
nor of--in short, I then knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved
in the affair of which I had now become a part, unless perchance it were my
Nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwümpel--or Suing Sophie!
from Riddle of the Traveling Skull in 1934 by Harry Stephen Keeler.
[Contributor:
John Savard, Edmonton]
[#30]
Here's
one for ya! From the Harlequin Superromance Nobody Does it Better by Jan
Freed
The hero and heroine are trying to escape a hit man as they climb up the side of
a mountain, and this sentence occurs (page 247):
"She stuck to his prime-grade A tush like shrink-wrap to a
rump roast."
[Contributor:
Shannon Walker, Belmont, CA]
[#31]
I
came across a good one in the Southern Reporter (Scottish Borders local
paper).
"Prince Charles will be paying a surprise visit to the
Borders next month."
Some surprise now--especially as it went on to give details of his 2
engagements!
--
[Contributor: Damian Sharp, Scotland]
[#32]
Inspired
by this site about appalling excuses for literature, I went and dug out the
cheesiest horror novel I could find in the hope of discovering some humerous
literary blunders. Class Trip, by the curiously-named author Bebe Faas
Rice, yeilded two examples of note:
"Knowing Christabel..., it was obvious that she had mixed
up somehow in James's emotional breakdown. If she hadn't been, she would have
had no problem airing James's dirty laundry."
Curious.
Apparently, James's emotional state is linked to the cleanliness of his
clothing. Take note also of this little gem:
"Ron was acting like an entirely different person from the
one I was used to seeing at school. Christabel's put-downs were getting to him,
cutting him off at the knees and leaving him off balance and uncertain."
Well,
I'm no expert, but I imagine cutting someone's legs off below the knees leaves
them slightly more than off balance.
[Contributor:
Philip Alderman, U.K.]
[#33]
"To understand why the house makes so much money at the
craps table, you first have to understand why."--Roger Gros, How to Win at Casino Gambling, Carlton
Books (1996) p.74
I
realise this doesn't qualify as literature (even bad literature) but I think it
is important to recognise contributions to the bleeding obvious from all types
of writing.
[Contributor:
Stephen Hart, Sydney, Australia]
[#34]
After
reading the examples of bad prose now being listed, I chanced upon the
following passage in a horror novel entitled The Night Seasons by J. N. Williamson,
who is touted on the cover as a grandmaster of horror. I'm unfamiliar with this
fellow's work, but this is truly scary writing:
"With a cockeyed sense of elation and drunken mission, I stumbled
down the apartment steps and lurched out of the front door of the building.
Perspiration clouded my vision along with alcohol, and the slanting parking
space lines in the parking lot were making me dizzy. I located my '79 Omni (so
undesirable it could be safely left anywhere - nobody even seemed to want its
parts) in the late-night darkness that was like thick, malefic, homemade
jelly."
Every
sentence is richly deserving of comment. First, what is a "cockeyed sense
of elation?" The second sentence makes it sound as though perspiration is
clouding the alcohol, and includes the acutely inept phrase "parking space
lines in the parking lot." The parenthetical observations about the '79
Omni are add nothing to the picture and are redundant. And finally, my
favorite, "malefic, homemade jelly." Is that Satan's family recipe?
[Contributor:
Rick Gilbert, Lexington, MA]
[#35]
"We stopped for a light and I saw a young woman give her
ration book to a woman who wore a flowered housedress in exchange for a
ten-dollar bill."
--Gloria Goldreich, That Year of Our War (1994) p. 46
Was ten dollars the price of the housedress? That's fairly expensive for the
1940s. Did someone pay the young woman ten dollars to wear the dress? If so,
why? I had quite a chuckle at Ms. Goldreich's expense and, for the next couple of weeks
after reading it, shared this quotation with anyone who would listen.
[Contributor:
Joyce Gero Truro, Nova Scotia, Canada]
[#36]
In
my continuing search for bad writing, my attention fell upon that bastion of
children's literature, Enid Blyton. I'm easily amused.
She tucked the little thing under her fur coat and only its
quaint little pointed nose looked out. The four children, watching from the
window of the waiting-room, thought it was a little dear!
-- The Mystery of Tally-Ho Cottage, By Enid Blyton
Since
when did you describe a dog's nose as "quaint"? Note also that the
children are convinced that the dog is expensive ("dear").
The new-comers made such a stir and commotion that the four
children came out of the waiting-room to watch. Everyone was very hilarious.
Everyone
was very hilarious?? Unusual turn of phrase, Mrs. Blyton. Using similar
methodology, you could describe a tree as being Very Growing, or a car as being
Very Moving. I'm not sure whether this counts as bad writing or just poor
proof-reading, but it caught my attention.
Nyssa touched Tegan on the shoulder and said quietly:'Tegan ...I
don't know what's happening to the Doctor - none of us understands it. But I do
know that panicking is no use.' Nyssa touched Tegan on the shoulder and said
quietly:'Tegan ...I don't know what's happening to the Doctor - none of us
understands it. But I do know that panicking is no use.'
--Doctor Who - Castrovalva, by Christopher H. Bidmead
Hmm.
'Nuff said.
[Contributor:
Philip Alderman, Luton, the UK]
[#37]
I
thought you might appreciate this for the "Sticks and Stones" page. From
The Lion in the Valley: An Amelia Peabody Mystery by Elizabeth Peters
(1986):
"The blood that had abandoned her countenance rushed into
his."
A
very interesting transfusion, at any rate!
[Contributor:
Laura Sauer, Vernon, CT]
[#38]
Some
true literary atrocities have been committed by nature writers. Here's a
particularly horrible example from Hummingbirds of North America: Attracting,
Feeding, and Photographing Them, by former TV weatherman Dan True (author
of What Do Women Want from Men?), published in 1993 by University of New
Mexico Press:
"Since then I have learned of a very good but very
expensive commercial hummingbird mix for sick hummingbirds from Germany used by
the San Diego zoo called Necton."
It's
a pity that most of the book is at least marginally more readable than this,
because there are more scientific inaccuracies in this one slim volume than in
the last 20 years worth of books on hummingbirds. Though True makes many
mistakes of his own, a substantial number of errors lie in extensive passages
quoted from outdated sources. Maps of hummingbird distribution bear suspicious
resemblances to those a fairly recent, reputable work (with their original
captions largely intact, though nonsensical in their new context). One of the
most astonishing parts of this work is its bibliography, specifically this
self-referential citation:
True, D. 1993. A history of hummingbird feeders. Hummingbirds
of North America: Attracting, Feeding, and Photographing Them. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press.
Such
a monstrosity cannot be the work of just one man; only through spectacular
editorial incompetence could this work achieve such depths. One has to hope
that the editor wasn't a product of the University of New Mexico's English
Department.
[Contributor:
Sheri Williamson, Bisbee, Arizona]
[#39]
Larissa
MacFarquhar launches her interview with Nicolas Cage in "Stranger in
Paradise" in Premiere Magazine (June 1997) with:
"Three little wrinkles like a stack of tiny pancakes sit
just at the top of Nicolas Cage's nose, held in place by his bushy, Italian-guy
eyebrows, which extend out and down like two hairy arms around his
for-the-moment strangely vacant blue eyes."
[Contributor:
Name withheld, San Francisco]
[#40]
You
want bad writing - I got bad writing. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you. Star
Trek-- First Frontier by Diane Carey and Dr James I Kirkland. Doctor
Kirkland is credited as the dinosaur expert, since the story is set on
prehistoric earth. I hesitate to guess what Ms Carey's field of expertise may
be, since it certainly isn't writing clear, literate English prose. The book is
littered with cherishable errors - at a rate of one or two biggies every four
or five pages. Particular favourites include a resolute refusal to use the
phrase "He (or she) said" if at all possible. So we have:
Kirk clipped, Chekov bolted. (While not moving from his seat),
he malaised, Kirk distilled....., he resigned (While not going anywhere) Kirk
impugned.
Though
see Chapter 29 (below) for my all time favourite.
Chapter
23 starts with the entirely incomprehensible sentence: "Head
down into the storm they went, pressing barehanded to their chests an unshielded
sense of peril."
There
are so many pleasing subjects for speculation here. How does a group of
humanoids have multiple chests but only one head? Do you sometimes need gloves
to press unshielded senses of peril to your chest? Do senses of perils usually
come shielded and they took the shield off, or did they put a shield on and
then took it off afterwards? And if so, why?
But
all these pale into insignificance before the panoply of riches which is
Chapter 29.
We
have a Klingon who "gazed up at Kirk with
roguish languor."
A
dinosaur described as a "shriven corpse on the
floor." As I Catholic, I find it curiously reassuring to know that
Confession was available to prehistoric reptiles. A human is endowed with a
twenty-foot arm. (apparently only the one, though) and the best of the "he
said" alternatives.
"Pushing, Kirk under-girded, "But........"
And
I haven't even mentioned the rest of the book : Kirk leering at the bridge
screen, the seconds that went by like surgical time (faster? slower?) the chap
who cloyed to his work, Kirk reeling with respect for someone, disinterest used
for uninterest, Kirk's surfeiting nod, vilification used as a synonym for
hatred, and disdained for despised.
BTW
What happened to the sarky comments on The Eye of Argon? They were the
best bits.
[Contributor:
C Carter, North Yorkshire, England]
[#41]
Sacrifice
of Isaac, by Neil Gordon (Bantam Books)
Although
I managed to finish this 300+ page novel, the whole thing was written so awkwardly
that I just felt compelled to highlight some of the more glaring examples:
"She wore a sleeveless black leotard that showed shoulders
sloping from a fine, long neck; small, round breasts; a firm stomach above
womanly - not girlish - hips."
After
telling us her hips are womanly, do we really need to be told they aren't
girlish?
"The walls were covered with glass cases of the the sort
that might have housed a lawyer's Napoleonic Code in a story by Balzac but that
showcased, instead, a variety of small objects; a polyurethane-cased page of
illuminated manuscript, an alabaster swallow, a copper kohl vial on which Luke
recognized the fluid curves of Arabic script."
Who
cares what they MIGHT have housed?! "This time he answered in
heavily-accented English. 'Business, my dear.'"
Then
in French again, as if she were an old friend: "Like Count Mippipopolous?
With his arrow wounds?" It happened that she had read The Sun Also
Rises and remembered the count well."
Good
for her, what about us? Please, this literary name-dropping ("Gee, he's
read Balzac AND Hemingway") is irritating instead of impressive . . . And
shouldn't "count" have a capital "C"?
"Later, the sun rising to noon height, another reality -
the yang of Nicole's yin - introduced itself."
Huh?
"Nor, she thought, could they see the very Benami-esque
courage they carried into their strange rebellions."
Call
me a wet blanket, but something about turning a surname into an adjective just
seems pretentious . . .
[Contributor:
S. Pearson, S. Korea]
[#42]
I
present the following, even though it is not technically published writing, on
the grounds that it may well explain some of the other contributions to
"Sticks & Stones." It comes from a rejection letter I received
recently from a literary agent, Core Creations, LLC.
"Though potentially marketable, due to fierce competition
not enough of us here were enthusiastic about your material to validate an
offer of representation at this time. If you write something else, feel free to
consider us again."
Of
course, it has the merit of being the only rejection letter I've ever received
that made me feel as if I'd just dodged a bullet. Like everyone else who reads,
however, I must sleep at night knowing that there is apparently a potential
market for people who write like nitwits, and their job is screening
manuscripts. Or validating offers of representation, whatever that means.
[Contributor:
Doris Dungey, Des Moines, IA]
[#43]
This
isn't nice. The guy who used to run the parking lot at the newspaper where I
work had a book published in 1984 by a vanity press. The title was catchy: 'Beg
Before You Die.' It was a Mickey Spillane-tough-detective genre book, set
somewhere in the southwest. It got off to a really bad start, though, with an
opening paragraph that left you wondering what was going on:
''It was a long hot drive this afternoon, I was telling Kay, who
was sitting with her back against the right front door, her nicely tanned left
leg under her; the back of her right knee was swinging back and forth off her
instep, keeping a sort of tempo with the soft music that was coming over the
car radio.''
He
goes off his narrative halfway through the first sentence, getting tangled in
the contortions of Kay, the pretzel lady, and finishing with a desperate appeal
to the reader: Look! This car has a radio!
By
page 10, the protagonist and Kay have pulled into a drive-in to eat. Among
other features perfectly irrelevant to the story is the presence of a
Mexican-American carhop. After eating ( '' 'The
chicken is delicious,' I said.'') Kay changes out of shorts and into a
dress in the back seat of the car. Although it has nothing to do with story or
character, the author evidently felt that what happened next was a roaringly
funny scene and had to be included:
''The carhop came over to the car and asked if we would care for
anything else. '' 'No thanks!' ''Then it dawned on her. The first two trips the
girl had made to the car, Kay had been in the shorts and halter and now she was
fully dressed. She must have thought she had drunk too much tequila.''
[Contributor:
Dave Matheny, Ramsey, Minnesota]
[#44]
Edgar
Rice Burroughs is a natural Bulwer-Lyttonian. The opening sentence to Synthetic
Men of Mars seems to me a close stylistic match to our hero's archetypical evocation
of nocturnal tempestuousness by virtue of the hydrological subject matter and
the curious blending of the melodramatic and the quotidian.
From Phundahl at their western extremity, east to Toonol, the
Great Toonolian Marshes stretch across the dying planet for eighteen hundred
earth miles like some unclean, venomous, Gargantuan reptile - an oozy marshland
through which wind narrow watercourses connecting occasional bodies of open
water, little lakes, the largest of which covers but a few acres.
[Contributor:
Lew Mammel, Jr., Wheaton, Illinois]
[#45]
Generally,
if I don't like a book I stop reading it. Doom: Hell On Earth by Dafydd
ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver, however, was an exception. I work in the computer
game industry, and since this is a novelization of a computer game, someone
thought I wanted it. I did in a way. It's the most consistently bad piece of
writing I've ever encountered.
There
are too many examples to quote--you could pretty much include the entire book.
This one is a favorite, though:
"The truck stuck close to our bumper through the totally
porous checkpoint. After that, we just drove in typical L.A. style, weaving
drunkenly between zombie-driven trucks, leaning on our horn, all the time
heading for the ever popular LAX. I wanted to give the airport the biggest
laxitive it had ever had with Lemon Marine Suppositories. Cleans out those
unsightly monsters every time!"
One
wonders how often the staff at LAX gives the airport a laxitive to make the
planes take off more smoothly. And why the Marine Suppositories are flavored.
[Contributor:
Steve Honeywell, De Kalb, IL]
[#46]
Colin
Dexter, The Secret of Annexe 3 (one of the Inspector Morse novels).
"Soon the two friends were seated facing each other in the lounge
bar, the surgeon resting his heavy-looking dolichocephalic skull upon his left
hand."
"But these minor worries could hardly compare with the
consternation caused on the Monopoly front by a swift-fingered checker-out from
a Bedford supermarket whose palm was so extraordinarily speedy in the recovery
of the two dice thrown from the cylindrical cup that her opponents had little
option but to accept, without ever seeing the slightest evidence, her
instantaneously enunciated score, and then to watch helplessly as this
sharp-faced woman moved her little counter along the board to whichever square
seemed of the greatest potential profit to her entrepeneurial designs."
"She could recall, quite certainly, clearing away after the
soup course; picking up the supernumary spoons and forks that marked the place
of that pusillanimous spirit from Solihull, Doris Arkwright; standing by in the
kitchen as a Pork Normandy had slithered off its plate to the floor, to be
replaced thither after a perfunctory wipe; drinking a third cocktail; dancing
with the Lord High Executioner; eating two helpings of the gateau in the
kitchen; dancing, in the dim light of the ballroom, a sort of chiaroscuro
cha-cha-cha with the mysterious 'Rastafarian' - the latter having been adjudged
the winner of the men's fancy-dress prize; telling Binyon not to be so silly
when he'd broached the proposition of a brief dive beneath the duvet in her
temporary quarters; drinking a fourth cocktail, the colour of which she could
no longer recall; feeling slightly sick; walking up the stairs to her bedroom
before the singing of 'Auld Lang Syne'; feeling very sick; and finally finding
herself in bed.
I
think these sum up the faults of Dexter's writing: inappropriately complex
words, archaicisms and over-long sentences. Dexter - via Morse - often pushes
on the reader his prescriptive views on grammar and spelling, and seems to come
from the school of writing that views pomposity as clever and stylish.
[Contributor:
Ray Girvan, Topsham, Devon, UK]
[#47]
Do
you accept bad sentences from non-fiction books? Here are two from The
University in Ruins, by Bill Readings, 1996:
"Hence, Shakespeare, not the Greeks, is positioned by the
English as the prelapsarian moment of a spontaneous immediate organic culture
that the nation-state must seek to regain by means of the rational mediation of
University education."
"First of all, the British proletariat is not the product
of a theorization of the effects of industrial society by a Communist Party, is
not born like Athena from the head of Zeus with the Communist Party as
midwife."
An
awkward and an unlearned simile: Athena's midwife was Hephaestus, who brought
her into the world by taking an axe to Zeus' skull. If Readings had completed
the simile, he might have a clue to why the English workers have chosen to
disappoint Marx's plans for them.
[Contributor:
Mark O'Bannon, New Orleans]
[#48]
Here's
something short and terrible that you may like to consider for the Sticks and
Stones section:
"He looked at me with his bottomless-cup-of-coffee
eyes." Pg. 154 (hardcover edition) The
Flower Master by Sujata Massey.
[Contributor:
Scarlett Pearson]
[#49]
While
researching a biology project, I began leafing through a science library
periodical collection. Therein, I found a few volumes of a nineteenth century
public health journal, Sanitarian, one of which housed a very insightful
article on the prevention of constipation, written by a physician whose name I
don't recall. It's probably better that way, considering the degree to which he
waxed romantic at the end. I enclose his final paragraph for your edification
and entertainment.
"And on the field of battle which preventive medicine is
now and everywhere waging against the ills to which flesh is heir, the banner
of preventive constipation is well at the front. Indeed I feel confident and I
do greatly rejoice in this assurance, that when the enthusiastic physician who
is ever loyal to the guild, who keeps her escutcheon fair and stainless, who is
ever jealous of her honor, shall proudly make mention of her achievements and
will not then be omitted."
American Practitioner and News, August 13th, 1892
Keep
in mind, this writer is discussing constipation. All the flowery words in the
world won't change that, no matter what he may think.
[Contributor:
Bronwyn Foley, Middletown, CT]
[#50] When I read this sentence I immediately thought of the
"Sticks and Stones" portion of your Bulwer-Lytton website:
With listeners leaning over the velvet restraining ropes and
angling for pictures, John Glenn urged them to remember Shepard's 1961 Redstone
flight in its political context, when the Soviet Union was seducing world
opinion with the lingerie of Earth-orbiting technology.
-- Billy Cox, "Shepard Statue Honors American Space Cowboys," Florida
Today, March 24, 2000.
Sputnik
lingerie? Kinky!
[Contributor:
L. Lohrli-Kirk, Costa Mesa, CA]
[#51]
How
about this passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder Book For Girls And
Boys as an example of conciseness and accuracy in writing?
"I can hardly tell how many of these small people there
were; not less than nine or ten, however no more than a dozen of all sorts,
sizes, and ages, whether girls or boys."
Yet
after saying this, Hawthorne goes on to name the unspecified number of children
with exactly twelve names. So, first there might be nine children; then there
might be ten; but there were certainly no more than twelve -- until finally, he
breaks down and gives us their twelve names; and these names, he goes on to
tell us, are not their real names, etc., etc. Hawthorne then rambles on at
great length about the imaginary names of his unnumbered children for several
hundred words -- and all of this in the six page "Introductory" to
THE GORGON'S HEAD. Let's say what we mean, and mean what we say, Nate! And
let's pick up the pace a little -- and I don't mean pecante sauce!
[Contributor:
Steven M. Ruppert, Colorado Springs, CO]
[#52]
This
comes from Elizabeth Peters' Crocodile on the Sandbank, a mystery set in
Egypt in the late 1880's. Our protagonist has woken from a troubled sleep to discover
a hooded cobra on the foot of her bed.
"With a desparate effort I wrenched my eyes from the
hypnotic glare of the snake. I rolled them toward the door. I dared move no
further."
She
is saved when the hero shoots the snake. No mention of how she retrieved her
eyes.
[Contributor:
Liz Henderson, Durham, NC]
[#53]
I
nominate All Through the Night by Mary Higgins Clark as an example of
one of the worst pieces of fiction ever published. It is worthy of mention in
"Sticks & Stones." The characterization is two-dimensional (at
best), the dialogue is laughable, and the novel is one cliche after another.
The only redeeming factor about the novel is that it should give aspiring
writers hope, because if this novel can make it into print and even make it to
the New York Times best-seller's list, anything can! The following passage is
my favorite example of the cliches that fill the book:
Tracy tossed his slim folder on Lenny Centino back on the desk.
"Well, now that he's back, I'm going to keep my eye on him. If I see him
with that little girl, I may just bring him in. He'll make a mistake
eventually, and when he does, I intend to be there."
[Contributor:
Robert Villanueva, Radcliff, KY]
[#54]
This
gem is from Barbara Taylor Bradford´s Voice of the Heart: 771 pages of
sludge-like purple prose:
An ineffable tranquility hovered over the villa, was broken only
occasionally by the intermittent sounds of the staff going about their duties:
the whirr of the vacuum, the faint birdlike chirpings of the maids as they
dusted adjacent rooms, the echo of the butler´s brisk tones issuing orders, the
click of a door closing, the patter of distant busy feet. Gradually these
individual noises were beginning to merge, flowed together to create a vague
and muffled hum that hardly intruded at all on her gentle peregrinations
through the labyrinth of her mind.
[Contributor:
Nicole Simard, Bramalea, Ontario]
[#55]
Here's
another entry for the "Sticks & Stones" section which may or may
not be interesting. From the mystery thriller The Plague Stone by Gillian
White. Not a bad read, but her similes are wretched:
Pg.
81: "Marian's strained face beamed rays of
anxiety like a sickly sun"
Pg.
82: "She wanted to pick her heart up like a
naughty toddler and take it outside and smack it until it stopped leaping about
like this"
I'd
like to pick the author up like a naughty child and do the same . . .
Pg
89, referring to the town hall: "Today it was
in its starkest state . . . naked and waiting like a woman with wet hair
sitting dull and expectant before the stylist"
[Contributor:
Scarlett Pearson, Montreal, Quebec]
[#56]
I
was reading the technical manual for a camera mount and found this little gem.
Presumably the translator got paid for the work. The system is installed and works
beautifully in spite of my inability to follow instructions.
"If don't mount on the pan/tilt head, provide the mounting
screws in speciality for it. Select the mounting screws with taking into
consideration." Panasonic
[Contributor:
David Yeamans, Los Alamos, New Mexico]
[#57]
Ah,
come on. You people have no idea. :-) The all-time worst piece of
fiction ever published is Vampire Beat by Vincent Courtney. You can
literally pick a page at random and find something to howl at. I'll
demonstrate, but first I have to warm you up with the book's opening:
"The knife was poised above her heart. Her screams cut
through the dead, rotten air of the warehouse. Batiste Legendre smiled. He bent
down and soul-kissed the terrified eighteen-year-old who was to remain that age
forever."
Okay,
literally at random here:
Page
134: "The Happy Christian bookshop was a
quaint little place that catered to the born-again faction of the
community." (Funny, with a name like that I'd have thought they
were aiming at the Muslim market.) "Religious artifacts and books
cluttered the shelves." (So *that's* where I put that Shroud of Turin!
Always the last place you look.) "The store had a rosy cinammon smell from
the potpourri of cinnamon and rose petals in a wicker basket that hung from the
ceiling." (You don't say...how odd.)
Page
186: "Fear grabbed her by the throat. It was
the car, the green sedan, the same one which had taken her on her nightmare
journey the night before!" (Ah, thanks for reminding us about that
nightmare journey--otherwise it might have slipped our minds while we were busy
wondering what's gotten into Fear lately. And for cluing us in to the fact that
sedans are a type of car.)
Same
page: "It was as though she was trying to slog
through mud that was up to her shins--thick, clinging mud that sapped the life
out of her legs. Behind her she could hear the raspy breathing of her pursuer.
'Come on, baby, the master is waiting. He wants to hold you,' he wheezed. 'He
wants to kiss you. He wants to drink all your blood!'"(Well. The
only comment I can offer is, 'When there's life-sapping metaphorical mud to
contend with, who worries about vampires?')
Page
98: "He had a haunted look about him, as
though he had a horrible secret he was trying to conceal." (Trying,
but obviously not succeeding. This in reference to the vampire character, of
course.) "Brown froze the smile on Carver's
face with his steely glare." (He could have used his icy glare
instead, but decided that would be too obvious.)
I'm
not making this up. I would also gladly nominate Vampire Beat for a
Worst Cover Art Ever contest, if such a thing ever comes into being . . .
[Contributor:
Sarah Roark, Redmond, WA]
[#58]
"Maximus wheeled his horse at the end of the stadium and
started back toward two chariots bearing down on him in staggered formation. They
sped toward each other much like Medieval jousters." From Gladiator, by Dewey Gram, Onyx Books.
Beam
him aboard, Scotty. Maximus is caught in a time warp.
[Contributor:
Mary Ann Unger, New Jersey]
[#59]
You
literary sorts have no idea what burdens we newspaper writers have to bear.
This is the lead paragraph from a press release from Fort Hood, our nation's
largest military installation.
MEMORANDUM
FOR CORRESPONDENTS: ARMY DEVELOPS APPLICATION FOR WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT COALITION
June
14, 2000
The U. S. Army announced today the Program Manager (PM), Joint Computer-aided
Acquisition and Logistics Support (JCALS), as a member of the Workflow
Management Coalition (WfMC), has developed an eXtensible Markup Language (XML)
application specification (www.aiim.org/wfmc/) to facilitate workflow
interoperability. In addition to having served as coordinators and editors of
the new Wf-XML specification for the WfMC, PM JCALS is developing one of the
first production implementations of Wf-XML for a US Army
Communications-Electronics Command customer. Several integration efforts
already underway within JCALS plan to use the Wf-XML standard to interface with
remote workflow engines, as well as be the basis for future workflow
integration efforts.
[Contributor:
J.B. Smith, Waco Tribune-Herald, Waco, Texas]
[#60]
The
first two are really examples of bad proofreading rather than bad writing; the
third will be somewhat controversial.
1)
In the novel Star Trek: Klingon, on page 71, Commander Riker asks
Captain Picard, who has just put the ship on Red Alert until further notice:
"Percussion only. Or do you expect trouble?"
Now,
ignoring the fact that it should be a question mark rather than a period
between the two sentences, somebody obviously ran a badly-spelled attempt at
"Precaution" through a spell-checker, and took the suggestion,
"Percussion."
My
girlfriend suggests that it's a shame that they didn't further err by changing
"trouble" to "treble."
2)
This is a letter to the editor that appeared in the St. Louis Post Dispatch
some years ago, as its subject matter (the book"The Bell Curve, by
Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein) would indicate. Now, I'm not slamming
the writer of the letter; he is (presumably, hopefully) not someone who makes
his living by writing. I am, however, slamming whoever was responsible for
proofreading and editing the letters page; normally, letters to the editor do
not get printed verbatim, at least, not if they need editing as badly as this
one did:
"The book, The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray and
Richard Herrnstein, is a faulty continuation of a myth. I'm surprised such a
study can be taken so seriously.
"Murray and Herrnstein's first mistake is reliance on IQ
tests. Haven't we explored this fallacy thoroughly enough? IQ tests are not
scientific and have little value in judging intelligence. The creator of the IQ
test, German psychologist W. Stern, wrote in his introduction that these tests
should not be given to black children. Stern obviously knew what Murray and
Herrnstein never admit -- IQ tests are written for white children and adults
because environment plays such an important equation.
"The second mistake and perhaps the most injurious one by
the Murray-Herrnstein team is that the difference in IQ is genetic. Since when
are these two certified as geneticists? What could they possibly know about
genetics except the flawed finding of researchers who fit their mode of
thinking? Genetics is still a new science. Down syndrome and the defective gene
for dyslexia have just recently been explored.Genetics has a long way to go
before it can tell us anything about intelligence or the lack thereof between
blacks and whites.
If, as Murray and Herrnstein assert, most Americans are between
the middle range IQ, then what is the point? And if it's genetic, why are there
whites who can't even read the theory Murray and Herrnstein have written.
Murray readily admits that the purpose of the book is to justify the
elimination of welfare and affirmative action programs because the low IQs of
blacks is in their genes and therefore can never be altered to justify the
expensive of such social programs. We all need to dismiss and destroy this
inauspicious theory, which will injure so many who are not capable of
understanding its implications. 'The Bell Curve' is 850 pages of sloppy
research. Any study that would not appropriate environment as a factor in
intelligence should be repudiated on its very face."
Ow.
My brain hurts. I'd go into detail as to what was wrong with that, but I don't
care to spend more than another hour or so. 3) Lolita, by Vladimir
Nabokov. Many people seem to feel that his language is gorgeous and evocative;
I just found it badly overdone. Obviously, I can't quote ALL the
Bulwer-Lyttonesqe passages from the book, so what I'm going to do is this: I'm
going to RANDOMLY flip it open to a pair of pages, and scan. I guarantee that I
can find a paragraph that would be competitive in the BLFC.
pp.60-61:
"Immediately afterward (as if we had been struggling
and now my grip had eased) she rolled off the sofa and jumped to her feet -- to
her foot, rather -- in order to attend to the formidably loud telephone that
may have been ringing for ages as far as I was concerned. There she stood and
blinked, cheeks aflame, hair awry, her eyes passing over me lightly as they did
over the furniture, and as she listened or spoke (to her mother who was telling
her to come to lunch with her at the Chatfields -- neither Lo nor Hum knew yet
what busybody Haze was plotting), she kept tapping the edge of the table with
the slipper she held in her hand."
Seek
on any random pair of pages in the book, and you'll find an equally convoluted
and Bulwer-Lyttonesque sentence or two.
[Contributor:
Jim Yanni, St. Louis, MO]
[#61]
This
is a rather obscure reference; the book is a sci-fi pulp novel that is
(doubtless long) out of print, titled Assassins From Tomorrow, by Peter
Heath. The story is a tale of how president Kennedy was actually assassinated by
time travelers (at least, that's what the dust-jacket says; I'm 83 pages in out
of a total of 160, and I've seen very little hint of this) and it is, in
general, about as bad as you might expect. But ignoring, for the moment, the
fact that the plot is silly, the characters one-dimensional, and the writing
style about what one would expect in a pulp written in 1967. there have been a
couple of notable errors:
on
page 81, the main character is erecting a gadget that will help to save the
day, and we are faced with this passage:
"The noon sun was starting to blister the back of his neck
before the last connection was soldered. All that remained was to connect the
four large aircraft batteries to the terminals of the transmitter and reciever.
That could wait until later. The next thing to do was to set up the dish
antenna . . ."
If
"all that remained" was (A), then presumably, the next thing to do
should not be (B). Then, on page 83, a shark is being shot. ". . . soon, more bullets were chewing into the
hides of the killer fish."
They
may have been chewing into the shark's SIDES, or its HIDE. But unless I'm very
mistaken, most sharks only have one HIDE.
[Contributor:
Jim Yanni, St. Louis, MO]
[#62]
This
is from the advance reading copy of Ladies with Options, by Cynthia
Hartwick, to be published in February 2001.
"Agnes liked her job too much and carried it with her. She
was like a human LEGO display--loveable but provoking."
A
true gem, I'm sure, if we could ever figure out what was loveable or provoking
about a display of plastic toy building blocks.
[Contributor:
Lisa, Rialto, California]
[#63]
About
ten years ago I bought a copy of The Gate to Women's Country by Sherri
S. Tepper to while away the time on a two-hour ferry ride. I read the first few
pages and after recovering from my laughter I spent the rest of the ride
walking out on the decks. I don't know if the book itself is any good, I've
never been able to get past the beginning. Here is the opening paragraph.
"Stavia saw herself as in a picture, from the outside, a
darkly cloaked figure moving along a cobbled street, the stones sheened with a
soft early spring rain. On either side the gutters ran with an infant chuckle
and gurgle, baby streams being amused with themselves. The corniced buildings
smiled candlelit windows across at one another, their shoulders huddled
protectively inward - though not enough to keep the rain from streaking the
windows and making the candlelight seem the least bit weepy, a luxurious
weepiness, as after a two-hanky drama of love lost or unrequited."
I
could comment on every sentence but I'll keep it short. How can the candlelight
be the least bit weepy and luxuriously weepy at the same time. And if you need
to use a second hanky because the first is too wet then you ain't weeping,
you're crying your eyes out.
This
prose goes on as far as I have gotten into the book but I'll only add the third
paragraph here.
"Stavia the observer noted particularly the quality of the
light. Dusk. Gray of cloud and shadowed green of leaf. It was apt, this light
-- well done for the mood of the piece. Nostalgic. Melancholy without being
utterly depressing. A few crepuscular rays broke through the western cloud
cover in long, mysterious beams, as though they were searchlights from a celestial
realm, seeking a lost angel perhaps or some escaped soul from Hades trying
desperately to find the road to heaven. Or perhaps they were casting about to
find a fishing boat, out there on the darkling sea, though she could not
immediately think of a reason that the heavenly ones should need a fishing
boat."
[Contribitor:
Ray Dornan, Langley, B.C., Canada]
[#64]
"All who knew Yas, knew Yas was freakin'."
"You could run around in Angel Hair socks for months without getting holes
in them."
"People doubted."
By
Ron Bracle, Beyond the Known. Yes, Yas is one pretty freakin' guy,
people doubted, and angel hair socks. Now that makes sense. If you turn to just
about any page in the book you will find sentences just like these. In fact, I
have only found two sentences that made any sense at all in the whole book.
[Contributor:
A. McCollum, Ohio]
[#65]
Two
more examples of competition-class Bulwer-Lyttony, cunningly impenetrable prose
from The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics by Cambridge
political theorist John Dunn:
"For most of the last two hundred years, it has been
natural (and perhaps reasonable) to suppose that the root of these
disagreements lies in a conflict of intuition about the imaginative and
material basis of political authorization, on what (if anything) could
rationally entitle some humans to command others so decisively, and what might
imaginatively impel the latter to concede that this was reasonable."
This
passage could be replaced with a simple declarative sentence: "Politics
involves deciding who is in charge."
"The modern republic is a passive local implementation
device of a global and utterly humanly uncontrollable collective madness. It
sustains a façade of local (and human) control, and by doing so facilitates and
reinforces the profound corruption of human purpose which has always lent such
force to the market, and which by now has fashioned a world in which almost
anything is openly for sale." Huh?
[Contributor:
Michael P. Morley, Akron, Ohio]
[#66]
From
Triangle by Irene Pence. True crime book about a man who killed his
girlfriend's lesbian lover and stuffed the body into a 3' high barrel. After
shooting the woman and shoving her body into the container, he left his house,
but "The woman would not let him forget her.
Soon she would call to him with an acrid aroma he couldn't ignore."
Irene
has a thing about eyes. While a detective is preparing to open the barrel, "All eyes were on the barrel, and all of those eyes
were large." Later, in court, "The family kept their eyes on
the witness, but most of those eyes were moist." Another hostile witness
had ". . . short hair, but today his temper was shorter."
This
book was so bad, the only thing that kept me reading was the fun I was having
highlighting horrid writing.
[Contributor:
Carina MacDonald, Denver, Colorado]
[#67]
Quite
why P. D. James - the English crime writer - has attained such a reputation, I shall
never know. Every page of every novel presents examples of ill-considered,
pompous and tortuous prose. Let us open A Taste for Death at random:
Whatever the time of year, except in the worst of winter
weather, this was her nightly routine. She would pour herself a whisky, Bell's,
and take out the glass for these minutes of contemplation, rather, she thought,
like a caged prisoner reassuring herself that the city was still there. But her
small flat was no prison . . .
Let
us consider this for a few moments.
Why
should she fail to pour herself a whisky 'in the worst of the winter weather'?
Would not adverse climatic conditions be exactly those under which any sensible
person would adhere most eagerly to this routine?
Why
should she 'pour herself a whisky' and then 'take out the glass'? Where has she
poured the whisky? Down the kitchen sink? Over her shoes? Most of us, I
daresay, would take out the glass before pouring the whisky.
How
many caged prisoners - as opposed, I guess, to uncaged and wholly at liberty
prisoners - pour themselves a short at bedtime? Given that the 'she' here is a
police officer, the reader ought to expect a slightly greater degree of
awareness in respect of the conditions of incarceration.
Why
should a 'caged prisoner' wish to reassure herself/himself 'that the city was
still there'? Where else would it be? Gone to Miami for a fortnight's break?
Would 'a caged prisoner' be distressed or elated at the sudden and unexplained
absence of a city? I only ask.
Then,
lo, we discover that her 'small flat' is not in the least like a prison; so the
point of the elaborate simile is lost. She is having a pleasant drink in a
dwelling that does not resemble a cell. One might as well write, 'It was as
though he had returned home and glanced in the mirror and discovered that his
face had turned green, except that he had not glanced in the mirror - and his
face had remained its normal colour.' Or, perhaps, he was a 'caged prisoner'
who had not returned home at all . . .
[Contributor:
Steve Prasher, Stockport, Cheshire, U.K.]
Response:
I'm not a big fan of P. D. James's
writing, but I feel I must defend her from some of the charges leveled by Steve
Prasher at Sticks & Stones #67. He cites this passage from A
Taste for Death:
Whatever the time of year, except
in the worst of winter weather, this was her nightly routine. She would pour
herself a whisky, Bell's, and take out the glass for these minutes of
contemplation, rather, she thought, like a caged prisoner reassuring herself
that the city was still there. But her small flat was no prison.
and then raises a number of objections, the
first two of which are that bad winter weather should not prevent the
character from pouring herself a whiskey, and that it makes no sense to pour
the whiskey before taking out the glass. The problem is that Mr. Prasher
has (by his own admission) selected this passage at random, which probably
means that he hasn't read the paragraph that precedes it. If he had, he
would know that the character doesn't pour the whiskey and then take the glass
out of the cupboard; she pours the whiskey and then takes the glass out
onto the balcony. (He might, in fact, have suspected this just from
internal evidence, as I did, but reading the previous paragraph would have made
it plain.) In addition to disposing of the sequencing problem, this
explains why "the worst of winter weather" might interfere with
this particular routine.
I haven't read the whole novel, so I don't
know why the character feels like a prisoner or needs reassurance of the city's
continued presence. I'm willing, though, to assume that an understanding
of the context might resolve these questions as well. If so,
we're left only with the redundancy of "caged prisoner," which is
pretty small beer.
Is this bad writing because it's possible for
an unsympathetic reader to misconstrue it when it's divorced from its context?
[#68]
If
only this were the initial sentence to the novel, I would suggest changing the
name of the Bulwer-Lytton contest to the Herman Melville fiction contest; it is
unquestionably the most impressive potential entry for the contest that I've
ever seen, absolutely unbeatable if you ever run a "celebrity
Bulwer-Lytton contest" involving published writing. It's from that
"classic" of American literature, Moby Dick; from the chapter
"The Whiteness Of The Whale" (chapter 42); in this chapter, Melville spends
7+ pages explaining why, although in many situations, white is considered a
GOOD color, in this instance, it seems more reminiscent of the spectral and is
therefore scary. The following sentence/paragraph takes up ONE of those 7+
pages:
Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances
beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles,
japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a
certain royal pre-eminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of
Pegu placing the title 'Lord Of The White Elephants' above all their other
magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling
the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing
the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire,
Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same
imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race
itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and
though, besides all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness,
for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other
mortal sympathies and symbolisings, this same hue is made the emblem of many
touching, noble things -- the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though
among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the
deepest pledge of honour; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty
of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of
kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher
mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the
divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white
forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies,
Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the
noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the
holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held
the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of
their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all
Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb
or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the
Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of
our Lord; though in the vision of St. John, white robes are given to the
redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the
great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet
for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable,
and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this
hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights
in blood.[469 words]
[Contributor:
Jim Yanni, University City, Missouri]
[#69]
THE
WORD OF THE WEEK:It appears in the phrase "Markets
have 'nichified.'" used by Mr. and Mrs. A.Toffler, co-authors of Future
Shock writing in the Wall Street Journal. Did you realize that
something could be nichified? The logical conclusion is that if someone is
doing the classifying he (or she) is the Nichifier. If the classifier is really
good, she (or he) may go down in history as The Great Nichifier. If you're the
target, beware -- you've been nichified. As a verb: I nichify, you nichify, he
(or she) nichifies, etc.
I
must stop now before I get pigeonholed in the wrong compartment, or
compartmentalized in the wrong pigeonhole. Whatever -- I've found my own little
niche in the deep (very deep) recesses of the publishing world - a contribution
to "Sticks & Stones" on the unique use of language by writers who
were paid a hell-of-a-lot more for their article than the contributors were
paid for their articles. As a matter of fact, if the Tofflers got paid
anything, it's a hell-of-a-lot more than I've been paid.
[Contributor:
Samuel W. Halper, Los Angeles, CA]
[#70]
The
Star Trek novel, Killing Time, by Della Van Hise (Original Series #24),
is in general a turkey of a book, with a truly bad basic concept (the Romulans tamper
with the time stream in an attempt to eradicate the Federation retroactively,
and they succeed, sort of, in creating an alternate time line, but about half
of the Enterprise crew in the alternate time-line (including Kirk and Spock)
REMEMBER the original time line in their dreams, and this, presumably, enables
them to fix things.) Further, the characterizations of the Romulan villains of
the piece are paper-thin, cardboard characters with no plausibility. But none
of this is the reason that I'm "honoring" the book here. No, I'm
"honoring" it for this passage: (pg. 66)
"He rolled onto his back, and an illegible cry tightened
the muscles in his thick neck."
I
hope I don't NEED to point out that ALL cries are "illegible"; what
she clearly meant is "unintelligible." And authors who don't know the
difference between those two words shouldn't be writing. Of course, editors who
don't know the difference between those two words should likewise get out of
the business, but that's another question.
[Contributor:
Jim Yanni, University City, Missouri]
[#71]
Dragonfly, Frederic S. Durbin. Arkham House Publishers, Inc., 1999.
I
have not read such long, involved and confusing sentences since I tried to read
The Last Days of Pompeii one boring summer when I was fourteen (It was
my great-Aunt's book and had an interesting frontpiece). Here is an example of
the first two sentence of the book:
"Bad thing were starting to happen again in Uncle Henry's
basement. These were things that had happened before, when the wind swung
round, when the trees all felt the blood rush to their leaves after the
exertion of August and the idling of September; when the chuckle-dark harvest
moon shaped pumpkins in its own image, brought its secret wine flush to the
scarcrows' cheeks; when the rich bounties of the land lay plump for the taking
and the light left them alone for longer and longer at a time."
The
entire book is written in this manner.
[Contributor:
Cindy Rosser, Odessa, Texas]
[#72]
In
the, "metaphors run amok" category (so bad it's good):
"You got further plucking the chicken in front of you than trying
to start on one up a tree. Especially when the tree was in another country, and
there might not even be another chicken."
Robert
Jordan, The Path of Daggers, p. 421
[Contributor:
Amy S. Bruckman, Atlanta, GA]
[#73]
Browsing
on the web, I came across a novel by Bertha Muzzy Bower called Jean of the
Lazy A. The first sentence is real Bulwer-Lytton contest material. This is
a genuine published novel:
How
Trouble Came to the Lazy A, Chapter One:
Without going into a deep, psychological discussion of the
elements in men's souls that breed events, we may say with truth that the Lazy
A ranch was as other ranches in the smooth tenor of its life until one day in
June, when the finger of fate wrote bold and black across the face of it the
word that blotted out prosperity, content, warm family ties,--all those things
that go to make life worth while.
(How Trouble Came to the Lazy A, Chapter One)
[Contributor:
Tobias Robison, Princeton, NJ]
[#74]
In
Tides, Melanie Tem writes from the point of view of a man with
Alzheimer's and makes sure her readers are as muddled as he is. Two examples:
Not infrequently he did not recognize his daughter when she
entered his field of vision.
(p.5)
Every once in a while he got away, and the sense of freedom when
he wasn't under their gaze could be exhilarating, until he considered what it
meant about his life that he felt free when what he really was was lost; what
it said about him that just being out on the sidewalk or among trees by himself
made him feel freed; pretty pitiful, when you thought about it. (5-6)
At
that point, I closed the book and felt freed myself.
[Contributor:
Phillis Fox]
[#75]
In
the March 8, 2001 Press-Democrat (Sonoma County, California), sports
writer Jeff Fletcher asks of San Francisco Giants second baseman Jeff Kent (pp.
c1 & c7) "How does a kid from Huntington
beach wind up castrating cows in South Texas?"
I
would like to know how a kid from anywhere can castrate cows, and not just in
South Texas. Cows are generally differently anatomically endowed. If he was
milking them I would understand. But this is Texas we're discussing and . . .
well, I wonder what they do with their bulls?
[Contributor:
Bill Crowley, Santa Rosa, CA]
[#76]
From
A Monstrous Regiment of Women by Laurie R. King (1995):
"The solitary waitress, a thin woman with bad teeth, six hands,
and the ability to keep eight quick conversations on her tongue simultaneously,
wove her way through the nonexistence gaps, slapped a cup of tea onto the table
in front of me, and took my order for eggs and chips and beans on toast without
seeming to listen. The laden plate arrived before my sweet orange-coloured tea
had cooled, and I set to putting it inside me."
I
did enjoy this book. I was willing to forgive the six hands, the
"nonexistence gaps"(whatever such might be), and the eggs, chips, and
beans all apparently piled on toast (all three mixed together, or would one
expect three separate pieces of toast?). However, the image of Mary Russell,
aspiring young detective, attempting to stuff a dinner plate into her mouth (or
other orifice) -- that was too much. Ms. King knows how to write. She should
learn how to edit.
[Contributor:
Randy Geithman]
[#77]
I
love Laurell K. Hamilton's novels for a variety of reasons, but her prose style
is not one of them. Here's an example from Narcissus in Chains that
illustrates why:
"I stalked him the way he'd stalked me, and part of me
noticed that I was placing my feet one atop the other, almost stepping in my
own footsteps, like a cat."
I
had to stop reading at this point, as I had a mental image of the intrepid
heroine tripping over her own feet to dispel. As I finally read on, so, too,
had the author written on. And on and on.
"The walk was oddly graceful, swaying my hips. My spine was
very straight, shoulders back, arms almost motionless at my sides, but there
was a tension running through my upper body, an anticipation of action, of
violence."
There
was a tension running through my body, too, as I wondered when the Ms. Hamilton
would get past the overwrought description, already, and get back to the action.
[Contributor:
E. Powell, Tampa, FL]
[#78]
I
have to submit this as the worst metaphor ever for the act of making love.
Written by Robert K. Tanenbaum, in one of the Butch Karp novels (i.e., Enemy
Within, Act of Revenge):
"And then he was fully socketed to her, like a pipe wrench
in a crock of warm chili."
I
swear to God I'm not making this up. Robert must be a lonely man.
[Contributor:
Jim Hintzen, Phoenix, AZ]
[#79]
Russell
Crowe stars in the over-produced Hollywood make of Patrick O'Brian's sea novel
of the Napoleonic wars, Master and Commander (1970), whose opening
sentence reads suspiciously like a Bulwer-Lytton Contest entry:
"Past the word for Captain Aubrey, pass the word for
Captain Aubrey," cried a sequence of voices, at first dim and muffled far
aft on the flagship's maindeck, then growing louder and more distinct as the
call wafted up to the quarterdeck and so along the gangway to the forecastle,
where Captain Aubrey stood by the starboard thirty-two-pounder carronade,
contemplating the Emperor of Morocco's purple galley as it lay off Jumper's
Bastion with the vast grey and tawny Rock of Gibraltar soaring behind it, while
Mr. Blake, once a puny member of his midshipman's berth but now a tall, stout
lieutenant almost as massive as his former captain, explained the new carriage
he had invented, a carriage that should enable carronades to fire twice as
fast, with no fear of oversetting, twice as far, and with perfect accuracy,
thus virtually putting an end to war.
[145 words]
[Contributor:
T. Smollett, Cooper's Droop, TN]
[#80]
I've
always been a huge fan of H.P. Lovecraft's work -- for many reasons, including
his ability to conjure up a really creepy atmosphere. Let's be honest though: prose
was not one of Lovecraft's strengths. The stories -- and the vision behind them
-- more than make up for his constant use of arcane adjectives. My favourites
have always been "gibbous," "fungoid," and
"non-euclidian"). There are limits, however . . .
Lovecraft's
first Randolph Carter story, 'The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," has
quite a hard-core fan following. Unlike most of his stuff, it's closer to
whimsical fantasy than to horror, and so it's a bit more purple than the bulk
of his work:
"So to the organ chords of morning's myriad whistles, and
dawn's blaze thrown dazzling through purple panes by the great gold dome of the
State House on the hill, Randolph Carter leaped shoutingly awake within his
Boston room."
I
can forgive that, just about. I'd guess that the majority of the letters in the
story are part of sentences longer than 50 words. He insists on going on
about ruddy Nyarlathotep, however. I lost count of how many times he ends a
sentence with a little note about the blind, hideous outer gods and the fact
that their soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, yadda yadda.
In fact, he seems to find it nearly impossible to mention Nyarlathotep at all
without reminding the reader that he's the messenger of the outer gods. I can
only assume he was being paid by the word.
I
can even cope with that, if I grit my teeth and skim. There is no excuse for
describing anything with a frothing 100+ word sentence, however. He does it
twice* and hey, guess how both of the sentences end . . .
The
longer of the two, at 113 words is:
"There were, in such voyages, incalculable local dangers;
as well as that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the
ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of
nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity
- the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud,
and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst
the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of
accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly,
awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic Ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless,
tenebrous, mindless Other gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos
Nyarlathotep."
(the
other one ends: "awful voids outside the
ordered universe where the daemon sultan Azathoth gnaws hungrily in chaos amid
pounding and piping and the hellish dancing of the Other Gods, blind, voiceless,
tenebrous, and mindless, with their soul and messenger Nyarlathotep.")
Ah,
the good old days...
[Contributor:
Ted Dedopulos, Prague, Czech.]
[And now, to Lovecraftian Sites in New
England, featured in Literary
Locales]
[#81]
How glad I am to find a place to
call truly atrocious sentences to the public eye! I came across the following a
few years ago and doubt I will ever see a worse run-on. Please do me, and
yourself, two favors as you read this: 1) read it aloud the first time, even if
you're alone, to see if you can get to the end without cracking up laughing;
and 2) don't scroll to the end of the message (below the spoiler space) to read
the (well-known!) author's name before you read the sentence itself.
Without further ado, I present three
short sentences of lead-in (the first is sort of a doozy anyway) followed by
*the sentence*:
"On Monday, the
officers sent for Henry, having arrested him, arrived with him. The Mayor and
Attorney Gen'l took charge of him, and set their wits to work to elicit a
discovery from him. He denied, and denied, and persisted in denying.
"They still plied
him in every conceivable way, till Wednesday, when, protesting his own innocence,
he stated that his brothers, William and Archibald, had murdered Fisher; that
they had killed him, without his (Henry's) knowledge at the time, and made a
temporary concealment of his body; that, immediately preceding his and
William's departure from Springfield for home, on Tuesday, the day after
Fisher's disappearance, William and Archibald communicated the fact to him, and
engaged his assistance in making a permanent concealment of the body; that, at
the time he and William left professedly for home, they did not take the road
directly, but, meandering their way through the streets, entered the woods at
the North West of the city, two or three hundred yards to the right of where
the road they should have travelled, entered them; that, penetrating the woods
some few hundred yards, they halted and Archibald came a somewhat different
route, on foot, and joined them; that William and Archibald then stationed him
(Henry) on an old and disused road that ran near by, as a sentinel, to give
warning of the approach of any intruder; that William and Archibald then
removed the buggy to the edge of a dense brush thicket, about forty yards
distant from his (Henry's) position, where, leaving the buggy, they entered the
thicket, and in a few minutes returned with the body, and placed it in the
buggy; that from his station he could and did distinctly see that the object
placed in the buggy was a dead man, of the general appearance and size of
Fisher; that William and Archibald then moved off with the buggy in the
direction of Hickox's mill pond, and after an absence of half an hour,
returned, saying they had put him in a safe place; that Archibald then left for
town, and he and William found their way to the road, and made for their
homes." (321 words)
from "The Trailor Murder Mystery" by Abraham Lincoln (yes, that
Lincoln!!!)
[This text was scanned from Dastardly Little Detective Stories, ed.
Weinberg et.al. (1993, Barnes and Noble Books).]
[Contributor: Roger Wolfson,
Redmond, WA]
[#82]
These sentences are from The
Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon. Her first three novels were excellent, but
in the past few years she seems to have adopted a new credo: Never say in ten
words what you can say in forty or fifty.
To find these examples, I simply
opened the book to a random page and copied. I'm sure there are longer ones,
but I'm not going to read all 979 pages again to find out.
"I was happy to
see it, but conscious of a small feeling of envy; I was all at once aware that
I had eaten nothing all day, that I was very cold, desperately tired, sore in a
number of places--and that without the complications of Mrs. Beardsley and her
companions, I would long since have been safely in Brownsville, fed warm, and
tucked up by some friendly fireside."
[Word count: 69]
"Encouraged by
the dark, the faint sense of intimacy engendered by the exchange of names--or
simply from a need to talk, after so long--she told me about her mother, who
had died when she was twelve, her father, a crabber, and her life in Baltimore,
wading out along the shore at low tide to rake oysters and gather mussels,
watching the fishing craft and the warships come in past Fort Howard to sail up
the Patapsco." [Word
count: 78]
The character described never shows
up in the book again after her inital thirty-page introduction.
"The middle shelf
was given over to more light-minded reading; a small selection of romances,
slightly ragged with much reading, featuring Robinson Crusoe; Tom Jones, in a
set of seven small, leather-covered volumes; Roderick Random, in four
volumes; and **Sir Henry Richardson's [sic]
monstrous Pamela, done in two gigantic octavo
bindings--the first of these decorated with multiple bookmarks, ranging from a
ragged dried maple leaf to a folded penwiper, these indicating the points which
various readers had reached before giving up, either temporarily or
permanently." [Word count: 87]
**[He must mean Samuel Richardson (and his "monstrous novel" [over a
million words] was Clarissa, not Pamela).]
Note how she kindly defines
"bookmark" for us in the last passage. Just in case we didn't know.
-- The following passage is from
page 255 of The Prodigy by Noel Hynd. The novel is about a piano player
who gets possessed by the evil spirit of another pianist. Hynd has a fondness
for repeating things, but this is the funniest example I found flipping
through. And yes, there really are that many ellipses! [begin]
And he realized . . .
the music was not his.
The interpretation was
not his.
No, no, no, he told
himself. This cannot be! A dead man cannot be in my body. Rabinowitz cannot be playing.
I am Rolf Geiger and I am alive and Isador Rabinowitz is dead and this cannot
be happening!
But it was!
He heard the
unmistakeable touch of Rabinowitz upon the keys. In every note, in every bar
and syllable. Even the touch of Geiger's foot on the pedal relfected the
execution and the interpretation of the dead man.
. . . the legato, the
cantabile . . .
It wasn't Geiger's. It
was Rabinowitz's.
Who in God's name was
playing?
How in the Devil's
name could this be?
What the Living Hell
was going on?
[end]
To make matters worse, a great deal
of the preceding is in italics as well, most notably the capitalized
"Living Hell."
[Contributor: Lisa Krause,
Huntington MA]
[#83]
Perhaps some of you have heard of
Robert Jordan, and of his The Wheel of Time collection. Praised by many
critics as the best of its genre since J.R.R. Tolkien, I am thoroughly engrossed
in the 10 book saga. However, due to a series of horrible word plays, I put the
book down many times with a sick feeling in my stomach . . . I present the
earliest such examples, from The Eye of the World.
"He gave a bark
of laughter. ' I hear she chased old Luhhan and the dogs, all three out of the
house with a broom.' "
What an appropriate place for a
"bark" of laughter, right before a dog anecdote. Without skipping any
text from the book, it resumes:
"Rand winced and
laughed at the same time. ' If I were you, I'd worry more about Alsbet Luhhan
than about the blacksmith. She's almost as strong and her temper is a lot
worse.' "
Wincing and laughing at the same
time huh? I'd like to see that. Alsbet is the blacksmith's wife, described as
"almost as strong and her temper is a lot worse." Just in case you
don't find the humor, remember what a blacksmith does... he tempers steel. My
stomach was in a knot.
[Contributor: Aspen, Summerland, MA]
[#84]
An article called "Sights from
the Long Tree" appeared in the Nauvoo Times and Seasons, of
November 15, 1841 written by my Great Great Uncle Lyman Littlefield (I include
only the first sentence).
"'Twas
morning--the sun rose under the brightest auspices, and the thin, vaporous
clouds that flitted in the heavens, continued gradually to flee away before the
gentle morning breeze, that seemed wont to greet their golden visages with the
soft rustle of its dewy wings--until not a hand's breadth of them were seen
remaining to mar the spotless beauty of the ethereal blue. "
My great great uncle Lyman named his
first son Edward Lytton Littlefield, "out of respect to Edward Lytton
Bulwer who in recent years has been familiarly known as Lord Lytton, and who in
the early years of my life, ranked in my estimation, among the most chaste and
beautiful writers in fictitious literature."
Lyman Omer Littlefield (1819-1893)
wrote his Autobiography and published it as Reminiscences of Latter-day
Saints (Logan, Utah: The Utah Journal Co., 1888).
His complete autobiography can be
found at http://www.boap.org/LDS/Early-Saints/LLittlefield.html.
There are other excerpts I could submit where Lyman emulated the writing style
of Edward Lytton.
[Contributor: George W. Littlefield,
Long Beach, CA]
[#85]
This submission doesn't fall under
the usual category of poorly-written "novels" -- this is actually the
text of a sheet of instructions for a small remote-control car, bought at Radio
Shack. Obviously the Japanese company that fabricated it has yet to grasp the
subtle art of translation.
I'll dig it up every once and a
while, just to laugh at the sheer horridness of it all -- enjoy. Best read out
loud, if you're up to it.
Usage Manual
1) Is not suitable for
the 3 years old and the following child
2) Before beginning uses must hard finish reading this manual
3) Suggestion is under the person's leading usage
Safe Rule
1) prohibition against
3 years old below of child usage;
2) play attention, you of finger, hair, clothes ...etc. don't touch and car
wheel, in order to prevent quilt harm;
3) car while driving do not want to by hand grasp it
4) don't let the remote control close to any fire with car original;(such as
electric stove, stove beside, or mightiness of sunlight bottom)
5) not want the place in danger to play;(such as street, steep slope...etc.)
6) don't let the wet water of car, and not want under the rainy day is open-air
usage;
7) not want on the sand ground to play;
8) forbid the child to tear open the remote control with the car
9) if the car dash to piecesed, and should pass by the person check or
profession personnel maintain the rear can continue to use
I think that "mightiness of
sunlight bottom" takes the cake here.
[Contributor: C. Dearden, Toronto,
Ontario]
[#86]
A teaser in the Philadelphia
Inquirer on August 20th, 2004, read: "The Olympic track and field
competition begins today, with the anticipation of further drug bombshells
hanging in the air."
I don't know what a drug bombshell
looks like, and I'm not entirely sure why it would be subverting the laws of
gravity anyway. Don't bombshells usually fall?
[Contributor: Josh Rosenberg,
Philadelphia, PA]
[#87]
"For a temporary
shorthand-typist to be present at the discovery of a corpse on the first day of
a new assignment, if not unique, is sufficiently rare to prevent its being
regarded as an occupational hazard."
-- The opening sentence of P.D.
James, Original Sin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
[Contributor: Edward L. Saslow,
Berkeley CA]
[#88]
A very prolific source of consistently
bad writing is the News Photos section of Yahoo News. The captions can make
your head spin. The one that comes most readily to mind relates to the Georgia
crematorium scandal. This caption accompanied a photo of two men who had
apparently been helping to retrieve the bodies, and who were walking away from
the site. The caption started:
"Two men carrying
shovels that didn't want to be identified . . ."
The writer respected the shovels'
wishes and didn't name them. And these people get paid to write this stuff?
[Contributor: Jean Herndon,
Kaysville, UT]
[#89]
I'm not sure if Web pages count, but
here's a description of some software from http://www.jumsoft.com/process/ :
Process 1.0, Jumsoft's
fresh face in the tired throng of outlining applications, is destined to draw a
crowd all of its own. Its sublime, user-friendly Aqua interface makes outlining
with Mac OS X a treat. But that's only the start of this all-round wonderful
experience. The end result is more remarkable still: Process 1.0 doesn't just
make it simpler to organize your ideas and projects; it has a favorable effect
on the outcome of all your planning that is nothing short of subliminal.
"Nothing short of
subliminal," eh? In other words, you don't notice any effect.
[Contributor: Alan Palmer, London,
UK]
[#90]
From River Road by JoAnn
Ross:
When he heard the
shower turn on, Finn imagined her naked, imagined himself joining her in that
compact shower, smoothing the fragrant soap that clung to her skin and made him
think of dark-eyed gypsies dancing around burning campfires over her lush
curves.
How shall I count the ways . . .
long, long, long. Why does the soap make him think of gypsies? Small gypsies,
too, if they can dance over her curves, and I really hate it when they light
fires there, too. Ouch.
[Contributor: Janet Mullany.
Cheverly, MD]
[#91]
I recently bought some putty,
manufactured in China. It came with the instructions, 'before
using putty, peel off skin and roll into a small ball between your finger and
thumb.'
Pretty serious stuff! It's a bit
like the notice on the gents toilet in Hong Kong that said, 'do not enter a
lady here.'
On another occasion I bought some
adhesive car door protectors. The accompanying instructions were quite
enlightening.
To avoid the bonkings
in the parkings.
Clean off fat and grease.
Stick the rubber side up before closing doors.
Shine your light from backside. If you donot see reflection you are on wrong
side of mirror.
I think Alice or the White Rabbit
would see some sense in this.
[Contributor: Barnaby Drake,
Tasmania]
[#92]
From The Bride Finder, Susan
Carrroll:
"An anguished cry
escaped him. It didn't disturb Madeline, for he trapped it deep within his
soul."
Somebody ought to send this woman a
dictionary so she can look up the meanings of "cry,"
"escaped," and "trapped."
[Contributor: Rose Wild, Perth,
Australia]
[#93]
- -From Even Cowgirls Get the
Blues, by Tom Robbins
"It is not a
belly button. (The umbilicus serves, then withdraws, leaving but a single footprint
where it stood: the navel, wrinkled and cupped, whorled and domed, blind and
winking, bald and tufted, sweaty and powdered, kissed and bitten, waxed and
fuzzy, bejeweled and ignored; reflecting as graphically as breasts, seeds or
fetishes the omnipotent fertility in which Nature dangles her muddy feet, the
navel looks in like a plugged keyhole on the center of our being, it is true,
but O navel, though we salute your motionless maternity and the treams that
have got tangled in your lint, you are only a scar, after all; you are not
it.)"
Amazingly, this is not the most
painful paragraph Tom Robbins has produced. It is followed by the detailed
discussion of the rectal temperature of an oyster and later by a self-indulgent
celebration of the hundredth page of the novel. Excruciating stuff.
[Contributor: Erin Buttermore,
Tasmania]
[#94]
Let me commend your attention to the
outstanding author Lorenzo Montesini who 'holds courtesy titles as Prince
Giustiniani, Count of the Phanaar, Knight of Saint Sophia and Baron Alexandroff.'
He currently (1999) resides in Sydney.
Copies of the Prince's 1986
self-published messterpiece, Cardboard Cantata, signed, are to be found
in numbers on the shelves of charity stores throughout Sydney, crammed beside
the fat, tinsel-wrappered tomes of Danielle Steel, Sydney Sheldon, and other
'read-it-once-and-toss-it-away' word-wights. But 'Cardboard Cantata' is a
sleeper, a treasure, a keeper. I collect literary dreck, particularly the
self-published, because it is instructive (bad writing teaches what not to do,
using examples one would just never have thought up oneself), but it must be
the genuine article. It must be clear that the author cannot write any better.
Steel, Sheldon, Collins and their ilk are obvious pros at confecting best-selling
schlock. The Prince, however, is a rocking chair natural. A gem: cut and
polished marcasite of purest ray serene.
I cite just the opening paragraph
(which I nominate for win, place, or show in the Opening Paragraph Most
Overburdened with Exposition World Championships), but one can open this
wondrous book at random and cull exquisitely cack-handed pars from every page.
'The shriek detonated
throughout the big house. It seemed to gather momentum rather than follow the
laws of harmonics. The young gardener looked up from the hedge he was clipping,
mumbled something in an aside, then calmly returned to his task, a cheeky
expletive on his lips. Farah, the maid in the kitchen looked up, raised her
eyebrows and continued to scrape the grapefruit into the Minton dish. Nellie
ran upstairs as soon as she heard the sound, she was the only one to act
positively in the household, she knew her mistress was awake.'
After just a few sentences, our
author emerges draped in satin sashes for Most Muddled Metaphor, Nouveau
Name-Dropping, Toshiest Tautology, Outrageous Overwriting, Damnably Dangling
Participles, Foozled Physics, and Simple Illogicality (Second Class, with
Raised Eyebrows). And we've barely started our tale.
I can't forbear to include the
second par, it is so loaded with beauty. Please do not adjust the punctuation,
it is here just as it was printed:
'She ran panting, she
found her, Babylonia Grushman-her mistress in bed, the papers opened around
her, Women's Wear Daily opened in front of her, a beatific smile on her lips
and eyes. Nellie could not figure out whether she looked evil or transfigured,
it was as if she was a Buddha in absolute Nirvana. Nellie had seldom seen her
like this before and felt like an interloper in a strange religious ceremony.'
I dare not cite the third par, it
may well kill you with aesthetic surfeit. I shall have to go and lie down
myself in a darkened room with a cold cloth upon my brow, but come on, fess up.
Is not our precious Prince just The Goods when it comes to Ditziest Glitz Writer
of the Antipodes? And Viking has published his autobiography . . .
[Contributor: Stephen Gard]
[#95]
The opening paragragh of Seetee
Shock by Jack Williamson.
"The void leered.
Implacable hostility flattened itself against the frosty dark, awaiting the
time to strike. Shocking danger fled away from him into the sucking emptiness,
and cunningly eluded him, and ruthlessly returned. Timeless peril watched
forever, with the cruel, cold eyes of the stars.
Nicol Jenkins, spatial
engineer, fought back silently."
That's as far as I've got, one day I
hope to read the next paragragh.
[Contributor: George Stott,
Edinburgh, Scotland]
[#96]
From Barbara Boxer's new novel, A
Time to Run. And yes, it is about two horses having sex.
"A ton of finely tuned
muscle, hide glistening, the crest of his mane risen in full sexual display,
and his neck curved in an exaggerated arch that reminded Greg of a horse he'd
seen in an old tapestry in some castle in Europe Jane had dragged him to."
Simply awful. I mean,
mind-bogglingly awful. Scratch out your eyes awful. And yet she continues.
"The stallion
approached, nostrils flared, hooves lifting with delicate precision, the
wranglers hanging on grimly. ... The stallion rubbed his nose against the
mare's neck and nuzzled her withers. She promptly bit him on the shoulder and,
when he attempted to mount, instantly became a plunging devil of teeth and
hooves. ... Greg clutched the rails with white knuckles, wondering, as these
two fierce animals were coerced into the majestic coupling by at least six
people, how foals ever got born in the wild."
[Contributor: David Lemmon,
Columbus, Ohio]
[#97]
I work for a trade publishing
company, and one of our products is a line of manuals for electricians. This
sentence is from the pre-edited text of a book on emergency power systems, as
sent to us by the writer:
"Simply reading
these words about an emergency power system that we have not seen or worked
with does not sufficiently describe the importance of this type of system; but
putting oneself in the position of being in the emergency room of a hospital
having a severed artery sewn closed when a tornado destroys the electrical
utility overhead pole-type distribution system and the room turns to blackness
begins to add clarity."
Indeed. In fact it was such a good
example I've kept it for four years.
[Contributor: Holly Messinger,
Kansas City, MO]
[#98]
OK, I'm reading a book called The
Lady Killer by Samantha Saxon, published in 2005.
These examples I found on three
consecutive pages.
"The boy swallowed,
his chubby cheeks bouncing on his face." Hey, it'd been to bad if they bounced right off, hey?
Then "the
lad ran in stuttered steps." Wha? The dictionary says that word
refers to a voice speaking or the rattle of guns, neither of which are relevant
to how the boy walks.
And finally, "Falcon starred at the wooden top still lying motionless on the
floor and purposely looked away . . ." Well duh.
Just bad writing, not the worst, but
irritating.
[Contributor: Michele Kiger, Laguna
Beach]
[#99]
I thought I'd call your attention to
Jim Caple's serial novel 24 College Avenue. It starts out describing the
lives of a few college students who live off-campus together, but then realizes
it has no idea where it's going, treads water for about 30 chapters, and
finally decides on this bizarre plot where the President of the United States
is a member of this Skull-and-Bones-type secret society made up of
"fops" who talk in the most stereotypically elitist English
imaginable. Here's a link to the most recent chapter, which I thought was a
particularly good example of how woeful a writer Caple is.
Some highlights:
"How could you
betray me like this? I trusted you! I made love to you! And it turns out you're
one of ... them." She not only spat out the final word, she spat in his
face. Emmenthaler nonchalantly drew out a monogrammed handkerchief and wiped
away the spit. "If it makes you feel any better, the sex was great,"
he said."
"You make it
sound so simple," the president replied. "Do you know how much
Escalades cost, not to mention bling bling?"
"We don't need to
get personal, Hudson," the president said, pacing in front of the
housemates. "Our plot was foolproof, absolutely foolproof until you
meddling kids got involved."
"Save your
breath. You may have the power to unleash a nuclear winter, but you don't intimidate
me. You don't know what intimidation is until you've had to deal with a shoe
factory foreman in Saigon. Now, those guys are tough."
"It sounded as if
he had a wolverine caught in his throat."
"I gained 15 pounds
of muscle. How could I do that if I wasn't taking a steroid?"
"How?" Higgins said. "Simple. Extra helpings at the training
table, more hours in the weight room, and most important -- confidence."
(MOST...CLICHE...EVER)
Note: This ESPN-sponsored page (
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/collegeave/story?id=2156943) sports
a number of indicators that it could well be an homage to the
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
[Contributor: Ben Kessler-Reynolds,
Ridgefield, CT]
[#100]
You may have seen this one before,
and I would love to see how it does in the real contest compared to everyone
else's.
"Almost
inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale
hand of an enormous albino with long white hair."
--Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
Dan Brown should be considered a new
Bulwer-Lytton, having sold a lot of books but written them abysmally. I've even
started a site, http://almostinconceivably.blogspot.com,
where I intend to document his lexical clumsiness the way Twain did Fenimore
Cooper's. I don't have much yet, but I will soon.
[Contributor: Marcus, Austin, TX]
[#101]
Vanity Fair weighs in with a fawning story on two of our reigning
celebutards--gasp!--Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes and Baby Suri:
"Tom's mother, an
upbeat, outgoing woman from Louisville, Kentucky, moves in closer. She watches
her son and daughter-in-law-to-be kiss. She sees her granddaughter Suri smile
for the camera. The sun reddens the peak in the distance. Tom's mom begins to
cry. Others on the hillside start to well up too. Tom seems to be forcing back
the tears himself."
"Daughter-in-law-to-be"
because Tom has not yet made an honest woman of Katie. Maybe after Suri reaches
the 5th Stage of Englightenment.
[Contributor: Claude Hopper, Coopers
Droop, TN]
[102]
This is an excerpt from Patricia
Cornwell's 2005 book named Predator in the Kay Scarpetta series.
"Wind gusting in
from the bay sounds like silk whipping, reminding her of silk stockings
whipping on a clothesline, although she has never seen silk stockings on a
clothesline or heard what they sound like in the wind. She is aware of the
woman's black stockings because tall stools and short, slitted skirts are a not
a safe combination unless a woman is in a bar where men are interested only in
one another, and in Provincetown, this is usually the case."
I'm not quite sure what to say about
this paragraph except that it makes me want to ask Ms. Cornwell, "What's
the color of the sky in your world?"
[Contributor: Edie Shulman, GA]
[103]
Here are a few excerpts from Morgan
Hawke's Enchantment in Crimson http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1554101557/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-5491606-8349646?_encoding=UTF8&v=glance
Morgan Hawke loves adjectives. She
hugs them and squeezes them and gives them a home and calls them George. She
will never put a healthy adjective to sleep. Sadly. In fact, it got to the
point when I felt defensive and angry for the poor nouns that weren't deemed
good enough for even ONE adjective.
A blindingly handsome,
young man was sitting on one of the barstools nursing an imported beer. His
dark, straight hair was pulled back into a tight tail that fell over his
shoulder and brushed his forearm. His pale, chiseled face was pared to the bone
showing fine, sharp features and full lips that belonged on the cover of a pulp
vampire novel.
Ah yes, you say, but surely we need
adjectives when it comes to describing what is obviously the hero -- even if he
does look like a cross between DEATH from the Discworld and Mick Jagger. But
read on . . .
Jennifer, her
tastefully made-up face wreathed with a deep scarlet smile, came thumping up
the tiny staircase in her shiny, black plastic, platform boots. She practically
danced with excitement into the circular booth.
Jennifer giggled,
struggling to sit in her exquisitely short, super tight, red plastic skirt.
Daintily, she crossed her legs, exposing a long line of trim, black
fishnet-encased thigh.
Jennifer licked her
artfully painted lips and darted a look over her shoulder, tossing her short
and stylish, bright blond bob that curled around her ears.
And yes, she starts just about every
paragraph with a character's name, too. It's very wearing.
[Contributor: Le Fantôme]
[104]
I'd like to nominate a few more
sentences from Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World, if I may. From the first
chapter, An Empty Road:
The pale sun sat above
the trees to the east, but its light was crisply dark, as if mixed with shadow.
Not only is this light
dark, which would seem to be impossible, since light is by definition NOT dark,
but it also has physical texture.
Gusts plastered Rand
al'Thor's cloak to his back, whipped the earth-colored wool around his legs,
then streamed it out behind.
Er . . . how is the wind managing to
blow in three directions at once?
A double handful of
geese waddled about, beadily eyeing the ground but not finding anything worth
pecking, and someone had tethered a milkcow to crop the sparse growth.
How much is "a double handful
of geese"? I would think that even one goose would take two hands to hold
it.
I'd also like to mention that Jordan
has a tendency to give different characters very similar names. For example:
[contributor: Tracey Pennington]
[105]
"Strapped into
the quivering soup can laughingly called a plane, bouncing his way on the
pummeling air through the stingy window of light that was winter, through the
gaps and breaks in snow-sheathed mountains toward a town called Lunacy,
Ignatious Burke had an epiphany."
Northern Lights, Nora Roberts
This is one of the worst sentences I
have ever read. Doesn't anyone edit this woman any longer?
[Contributor: Lorna Younger, Salt
Point, NY]
[106]
"Sandy-blonde
hair to her shoulders, held up in a simple ponytail by a green rubber band
fresh off the newspaper. No makeup. Strong back, long lines. Rigid and stern,
but also graceful. Cold but quietly beautiful. Complicated and busy, but also
in need. More like an onion than a banana. Her eyes looked like the green that
sits just beneath the peel of an avocado, and her lips like the red part of the
peach that sits up next to the seed."
--"When Crickets Cry,"
Charles Martin
I think he was hungry when he wrote
this.
[Contributor: Katherine Murphy,
Boston, MA]
[107]
From Pg. 754 of Bronze Horseman,
by Paullina Simons:
"Alexander's
bronze eyes were toffee pools of pain."
Oh, come on! :(
[Contributor: S. Pearson, Montreal]
[108]
"It was the first
evening in weeks that no one needed seclusion or restraint, and the hallways
echoed with the sound of nurses unclenching their teeth."
To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the
World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Gail A. Hornstein
If teeth are unclenched in the
forest when there is no one there, do they make a sound?
[Contributor: Lee Grossman, Oakland,
CA]
[109]
This excerpt is taken from the local
newspaper, The West Australian. It presumably pays its reporters, but
when they provide astute insights such as these, one seriously questions why.
Actual title of an article: "Richest nations share largest share of global
wealth"
[Contributor: L Smith, Perth,
Australia]
[110]
Below, from a press release from the
Oregon Department of Forestry, which I have cherished for years--I get it out
each summer at the beginning of fire season and send it around to my fellow
reporters as an example of the very best kind of overheated (ha!) writing.
Clearly, Sticks & Stones
will allow even more people to enjoy its drama. I might note that there are two
opposing camps regarding favorite sentences in the release: I am in the group
that likes "well-choreographed aerial
acrobatics with warlike assault maneuvers, taking turns dropping gallon after
gallon of waters to squelch the flames." (Hand over the thesaurus,
Mac, I'm still using it!)
Others, however, prefer the simpler
phrase "drop their liquid loads."
You decide. But be warned: it's an
awesome responsibility.
[Contributor: Jeanie Senior, Hood
River, OR]
[111]
'"You look very
pretty today," he said casually, and she stiffened imperceptibly, but he
didn't see it.' --- Danielle Steel, Malice
Another classic from our favorite
purple proseur. Normally far more sensible, I resorted to reading my first
(and, I vowed within the first few pages, only) Steel abomination in a fit of
boredom one school holiday. Even at the tender age of 16, I clearly recall
wincing as my eyes scraped past this horrible, horrible woman's butchery of my
beloved mother tongue [see #1 above].
[Contributor: Conrad]
[112]
This doozy of a mixed metaphor came
from the student newspaper at the University of Kentucky. The writer was
presumably not being paid to write, but close enough.
"If you happen to
visit a friend in Blanding Hall this semester, you may notice the soft tongue
of the French language resonating in your ear like molasses."
I didn't know languages had tongues.
And I certainly don't know French well enough to permit it to put its tongue in
my ear. And does molasses resonate at all, let alone in an enclosed space like
an ear?
[Contributor: Bob, Lexington, KY]
[113]
Newt Gingrich and William A.
Forstchen for their new "active history", Pearl Harbor.
I must admit, I discovered this
passage by reading Janet Maslin's review in The New York Times, dated Thursday,
May 24th. The credit belongs to her, as she was the one who actually had to
read the damn thing.
"James nodded his
thanks, opened the wax paper and looked a bit suspiciously at the offering, it
looked to be a day or two old and suddenly he had a real longing for the
faculty dining room on campus, always a good selection of Western and Asian
food to choose from, darn good conversations to be found, and here he now sat
with a disheveled captain who, with the added realization, due to the direction
of the wind, was in serious need of a good shower."
Really quite something for a
could-be presidential nominee.
[Contributor: Jason Woodruff,
Astoria, Queens, NY]
[114]
Read the following excerpt from Newt
Gingrich and William Forstchen's new novel, Pearl
Harbor: A Novel of December 8th, and--wow!--this is really a contender:
"James nodded his
thanks, opened the wax paper and looked a bit suspiciously at the offering, it
looked to be a day or two old and suddenly he had a real longing for the
faculty dining room on campus, always a good selection of Western and Asian
food to choose from, darn good conversations to be found, and here he now sat
with a disheveled captain who, with the added realization, due to the direction
of the wind, was in serious need of a good shower."
. . but I don't think I can legally
enter it on Newt's behalf.
Or can I?
[Contributor: Gretchen Schmidt,
Coral Gables, FL]
[115]
"Something whiffy this way
comes."
I've recently borrowed a few of G P
Taylor's novels, since a few people had mentioned them. I suspected I'd loathe
them, because one or two people had described him as "the next C. S.
Lewis" (he most definitely isn't), but they actually aren't too bad.
Except for one thing. One sentence.
One simile. Actually, two similes, because I got rather weary of him comparing
every high-ceilinged room or forest to the interior of a cathedral, but since
he's a priest I can let that slide. Perhaps it's just my taste, but I honestly
can't take someone who can commit a simile like the one I'm about to reveal as
a decent writer ever again.
It's from his latest, The Curse
of Salamander Street. Page 208, if you have the book. The characters are
creeping through an underground cavern, hunting what may be a werewolf.
They gathered pace as
they walked. The passageway grew narrow and low, causing them to crouch as they
stumbled on. The sound of water grew louder, and the gusting of the wind was
like the eerie farting of a giant animal.
Tell me, please, how farting
can reasonably be described as 'eerie'? In my experience, wind (of the
atmospheric variety) very rarely if ever sounds flatulent – perhaps if it blows
under a loose tarpaulin, making it vibrate, but otherwise, really, not.
Certainly not, I think, in a pothole under the Derbyshire Peaks, though I'm
happy to be corrected by a caver with the requisite experience. The characters
don't appear to think that the werewolf may be guffing loudly at them, anyway.
And how in blue pencil blazes
did it get past his editor?
[116]
I just read this and had to share
it. In Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, a bit of light reading that I
started with low expectations but this was really too much and I had to share
it:
"For no good
reason, I held my breath as I passed the sign welcoming me to Wind Gap, the way
kids do when they drive by cemeteries. It had been eight years since I'd been
back, but the scenery was visceral."
The scenery was what? I hope it
didn't hurt.
[Contributor: Diane Sarginson,
Edmonton, Alberta]
[117]
Leo thought to himself,
later, later I'll think about what it really means to be transported fifty-one
years into the future by a UFO.
Caroline Macdonald, The Eye
Witness, Hodder & Stoughton, Sydney.
(I very much enjoy this author's
work, but this redundancy annoys me no end and I see it all the time. You can't
think to anyone BUT yourself!)
Crossing the floor,
her foot bled all over the carpet.
Margaret Mahy, One of the Fortune
Quartet Books; can't remember which.
(Here's another author whom I very
much admire, but the image of a foot crossing the floor all by itself is
hilarious.)
Then he'll be waiting
at the door with a battery of high-powered solicitors waving writs and a couple
of policemen.
(I'd also like to see the policemen
waving the solicitors, preferably VERY hard.)
But that didn't make
the man who had fathered Perdita's behaviour any less despicable.
(Um ... I thought we were the
parents of our own behaviour.)
Four years had put on
a little weight . . .
Caution steadied her voice,
made her voice offhand as she shrugged.
(There were a lot of other close
repetitions in this book; this was the most awkward.)
Robyn Donald, Element of Risk,
Harlequin Mills & Boon
(Element of Risk was also
peppered with the worst purple prose I've ever encountered but I don't appear
to have saved any of it.)
At the sound, a volley
of arrows arced through the morning blue like a flock of deadly sparrows.
Brian Caswell, Merryl of the Stones, University of Queensland Press
(Another writer whose work I enjoy,
but the idea of sparrows looking even vaguely like arrows jerked me right out
of the story.)
If he were wrong, we
might then have an excuse to call this crazy thing off.
John Marsden, A Killing Frost, Macmillan Children's Books
(We're not in the subjunctive mood
here. So many writers use the subjunctive rule incorrectly that I'd like to see
it abolished. As a kid I could never understand why I became more than one
person in the phrase, "If I were you". There were also some
irritating plurals presented in possessive form--e.g. 44's for 44-litre drums
of diesel and k's for kilometres.)
. . . she could only
shout hopelessly as loud as she could, in frustration, expecting no answer,
"Lyo!"
"What?" he said beside her. Her shout turned into a scream; she seemed
to levitate before his eyes. He bent quickly to pick up the mussels she had
dropped. She came back down to earth finally and glared at his shaking
shoulders.
(The sudden, brief viewpoint change
in the middle of a sentence is disconcerting.) Patricia A McKillip, The
Changeling Sea, Oxford University Press
(McKillip is an extremely good
writer. Fortunately she doesn't normally make errors like this.)
Frightened of the
dark, he thought: how awful. Just like a baby. Stephen would never have been
frightened of the dark, up here. (Incorrect use of the word
"frightened"; it should be "afraid".
Another option would be
"frightened by".) Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising, Chatto
& Windus Ltd (Bodley Head)
(Not a serious error, definitely not
serious enough to drag me out of the story.)
But if it were in the
hydro it was well hidden.
(Apart from "it" being
referred to in the plural as well as the singular, we are not in the
subjunctive mood here.)
Andre Norton, Plague Ship, Methuen Children's Books (Magnet)
Kate sensed something
familiar about this person staring so rudely, and felt uncomfortable by it.
("And it made her feel
uncomfortable" might have made more sense.)
The girl's round black
eyes bored into Kate's, which were equally round but very blue.
(How can eyes bore into each other?
And this book won the Tom Fitzgibbon Award!)
As the heavy wooden
door creaks open, the black crow squawks and flies straight between us so that
we have to duck to the side, coming to rest on Rhauk's extended elbow.
(One person coming to rest on
another's elbow is startling enough, but TWO?)
Heather Cato, Dark Horses,
Scholastic. Editor: Penny Springthorpe
(I have to admit I didn't enjoy this
long-winded, self-indulgent YA novel. The blurb made it sound far more exciting
than it was.)
[Contributor: Laraine Anne Barker]
[118]
Peter Straub in The Hellfire Club
(complete with a quote from Stephen King on the front cover) serves up this
gem:
"A door closed, and
the Italian Girl, Maria, the short gray-haired woman who decades ago had
replaced the famous Helen Day, called the Cup Bearer, at other times referred
to more mysteriously as O'Dotto, came out of Daisy's studio carrying an empty
tray."
The mystery appears to be in the
meaning.
Since when was an Italian girl named
anything but Maria?
[Contributor: Arlington Nuetzel,
Gosnell, AK]
[119]
I'd like to nominate J.K. Rowling.
Her later books show an appalling lack of editing. I offer several examples,
because the media has convinced the public that she is a veritable goddess of
writing. Not always. Not in the last two books.
First, this sentence, from Chapter
28 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:
Then, around the
corner, gliding noiselessly, came Dementors, ten or more of them, visible
because they were of a denser darkness than their surroundings, with their
black cloaks and their scabbed and rotting hands.
Because black clothes are extremely
visible in complete darkness. They're practically phosphorescent. And what,
exactly, is "denser darkness"? Thicker darkness? More stupid
darkness?
Second, this sentence from the same
chapter. The sentence is ninety words long.
He saw the achingly
familiar Hogsmeade High Street: dark shop fronts, and the outline of black
mountains beyond the village and the curve in the road ahead that led off
towards Hogwarts, and light spilling from the windows of the Three Broomsticks,
and with a lurch of the heart, he remembered with piercing accuracy, how he had
landed here nearly a year before, supporting a desperately weak Dumbledore, all
this in a second, upon landing -- and then, even as he relaxed his grip upon
Ron's and Hermione's arms, it happened.
Which, I should point out, doesn't
make sense if you break it down.
First, at this point in the story,
Harry Potter has visited Hogsmeade about ten to twelve times in his
seventeen-going-on-eighteen years of life, allowing for cancellations because
of school emergencies, so "achingly familiar" is an overstatement.
Second, I can see the shop fronts
being familiar, but dark shop fronts shouldn't be familiar unless all the
Hogsmeade stores are shutting down due to a recession.
Third, about the black mountains
Harry mentions. This is the same boy who, in Chapter 7 of Deathly Hallows,
insisted that Voldemort couldn't be in a village in England because a village
with "a mountainous horizon and the outline of
the little village cradled in a deep valley . . . didn't look like anywhere in
England."
Fourth, I'm really not certain why
the road to Hogwarts is being described, especially as Harry and his friends
aren't going to end up using it.
Fifth, "he
remembered with piercing accuracy" is authorial intrusion.
Rowling's done it before, too, in Chapter 13 of Harry Potter and the
Half-Blood Prince: "This time," said
Dumbledore, "we are going to enter my memory. I think you will find it
both rich in detail and satisfyingly accurate.
If the memory is detailed and
accurate, Rowling, you won't have to tell me. I'll notice on my own. The fact
that you're telling me this ahead of time makes me suspect that you know it's
neither, but that you hope I'll believe you and not the evidence of my own
eyes.
Sixth, we hack our way through the
underbrush all the way to the end of this torturously long sentence, and the
only thing we find out at the end is that "it happened"? WHAT
happened?
Third, this line, from Chapter 25 of
Deathly Hallows. It combines two fatal flaws--wooden dialogue and lack
of logic.
"It is I, Remus
John Lupin!" called a voice over the howling wind. Harry experienced a
thrill of fear; what had happened? "I am a werewolf, married to Nymphadora
Tonks, and you, the Secret-Keeper of Shell Cottage, told me the address and
bade me come in an emergency!"
A) Remus sounds like the Demon King in a Christmas pantomime. B) If the person
he's addressing (Bill Weasley, for reference) is the person who is magically
keeping the location of Shell Cottage secret, which is what a Secret-Keeper
does in the Potterverse...why is Remus yelling this news aloud to anyone who
might be listening, including the villains?
Fourth, this sentence from Chapter
22 of Half-Blood Prince:
"There,
there," said Slughorn, waving his wand so that the huge pile of earth rose
up and then fell, with a muffled sort of crash, onto the dead spider, forming a
smooth mound.
The earth falls with a muffled . . .
CRASH? Fine. I'm just going to assume that the soil of Hogwarts is made of
metal, okay?
[Contributor: Tracey Pennington,
West Hartford, CT]
[120]
"A violent southwest
wind rolled ragged black clouds low over the town and the flatly swollen drops
of an intemperate rain formed a slanting silver screen all around him, dimpling
the street's watery mud and dancing a crystal dance on glistening rooftops."
Canyon Passage by Ernest Haycox (1945)
"He let the reigns drop over the saddlehorn, and brought the fiddle round
in front of him. There was no hurry, he would be there before daylight. And he
laughed as he ran his right thumb over the strings: "What a combination--a
fool, a fiddle and a tractor." The Desert Fiddler by William
H. Hamby (1919)
[Contributor: Jeff Solow, Philadelphia, PA]
[121]
"And so I left, and began to walk, and it was
the last of the gray hours, when there are no colors left in the world,
when his face on the sheets would be gray and set, like stone, when the
wrinkled sheets on the bed look like a frozen slate-gray sea, or like plowed
land dead beneath the first killing frost, those grainy hours when everything
resembles funerary sculpture." Susan
Fromberg Schaeffer, The Golden Rope [her tenth novel] opening
sentence.
The similes don't work and there are
too many of them. If I were to try to sneak this into the Bulwer-Lytton
contest (Purple Prose) I'd continue thus: "and not like the funerary
sculpture that Pietro, whose family were stone cutters for five generations in
the old country, makes, but like that cheap stuff made in Taiwan or someplace
and sold through mail order catalogues, except that with the Internet they
don't publish them any more, so I was really kind of down and wanted an Egg
McMuffin, but they weren't open yet."
[Contributor: Edward L. Saslow.
Berkeley, CA]