Dave Zobel

Winner of the 2004 Bulwer-Lytton [Bad] Fiction Contest

Questions that seem to come up a lot

Winning the contest

What's the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest?
- An annual bad-writing contest sponsored by the San Jose State University English department. The challenge is to come up with the opening sentence to the worst novel never written.
Your lousy winning sentence:
- She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight...summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp's tail...though the term "love affair" now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism...not unlike "sand vein," which is after all an intestine, not a vein...and that tarry substance inside certainly isn't sand...and that brought her back to Ramon."
What were you doing when you came up with that stinker?
- Cleaning shrimp for dinner. All at once, for no apparent reason, the phrases "sand vein," "love affair," and "Martha Stewart" drifted through my head in happy succession.
How could such a rotten sentence have won a contest?
- I have no idea; there were many entries that were far more horrid than mine. The judges mentioned something about "timeliness," by which I suppose they mean the fact that my sentence coincided with Ms. Stewart's.
Why did you mention Martha Stewart?
- I was honestly just looking for a strong, self-sufficient female archetype in a cookery setting.
Are you glad you won?
- I was actually hoping to get a Dishonorable Mention, which is an official award category.
What do you think of the other entries in the contest?
- Some of them are brilliant; I can quote them to you.
How did you find out you'd won?
- The judges sent me an e-mail asking very casually, "So...what can you tell us about yourself that might be suitable for a press release?" This made me think, "Aha -- can it be that they think I write bad fiction?" I responded with a very elaborate and clever press release, exactly none of which they made use of. This just goes to show, I guess, that they think I write bad press releases, too!
Why does your sentence contain so many ellipses (dot-dot-dots)?
- I experimented with commas, and then dashes and parentheses, but ellipses seemed to convey just the right amount of languid sophistication.
What did you do with your official Grand Prize of "a pittance"?
- It came out to $250. I donated it back to the judges of the contest, who are obviously in far greater need of it than I am.
What's changed in your life since winning?
- My book sold eight additional copies and then went into remainders.
Best thing to come out of this contest?
- Being photographed by Pulitzer-prize winner Nick Ut.
Favorite news coverage of this contest?
- Commentary:
  
  When you start comparing your S[ignificant ]O[ther] to shrimp poop, you know the magic is gone. (blog: cynical-c.com)
  Nothing screams BAD WRITING more than multiple ellipses in a single sentence, the stuff of heartbroken teenage poetry. (blog: edverb)

More about the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

History of the contest?
- Started in 1982 by Prof. Scott Rice at SJSU, who had been coerced into judging yet another good-writing contest. He found himself facing a stack of bad, bad writing and started the BLFC as a way of cutting to the chase.
Is it popular?
- They got over 5,000 entries this year, from all over the English-mangling world.
Why does the contest have such a strange name, and why is it sometimes referred to as "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night"?
- Many lousy novels and shaggy-dog stories begin with the cliche: "It was a dark and stormy night." Every one of Snoopy's attempts at a novel begins that way. The 1830 novel Paul Clifford, by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, was the first to do so.
Do any GOOD books start with "It was a dark and stormy night"?
- A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle, is such a phenomenally wonderful book that it can afford to start out with that absolutely trite sentence.
More info about the contest?
- Deadline each year: Officially April 15th, a date frequently associated with making up bad stories. In the spirit of missing deadlines, the actual deadline is sometime in late June.
Advice to people who might want to enter?

Other writing-related

Other books you've written?
- A goofy look at sailing: Bent Book of Boatspeak.
What's next for you?
- Soccer: Volume One in the series Kids' Sports without Apoplexy.
Are there other bad-writing contests?
- The Lyttle Lytton, the Faux Faulkner, the Imitation Hemingway, the Bad Hemingway, the Literary Review Bad Sex Prize (for the most embarrassing or redundant description of the sexual act in a real novel), and the simply named Bad Writing Contest (for honest-to-goodness professional writing that's just really, really bad).
Your favorite authors?
- E.L. Konigsberg.
Why do you write?
- Same reason Tolstoy wrote, and Carlyle, too: to annoy the wife.
  (I don't write to annoy their wives, however.)
Some of your favorite opening lines from literature?
- Moby-Dick
Do you remember the Monty Python sketch where Thomas Hardy is writing that very long first sentence of The Return of the Native and it's being reported on as if it were a sporting event?
- Yes!

Not related to writing

Hobbies?
- Burning dinner.
Worst job you've ever had?
- Pinsetter in a bowling alley.
Other things you've won?
- In a costume contest, dressed as a woman: Best Costume AND Worst Costume. (They couldn't decide whether the Margaret Thatcher similarity was intentional.)