David Chuter, who describes himself as a "harmless and rather obscure
bureaucrat," said he wrote the winning sentence in what he called "a moment
of total insanity."

He was the first non-American to win the top (dis)honor in the Bulwer-Lytton
Fiction Contest. The contest is named after Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, the
Victorian novelist famous for the opening sentence "It was a dark and stormy
night" from his 1830 novel "Paul Clifford."

Competition organizer Scott Rice of California's San Jose State University
said Chuter, 47, greased the competition with the following prose:

"Through the gathering gloom of a late-October afternoon, along the greasy,
cracking paving-stones slick from the sputum of the sky, Stanley Ruddlethorp
wearily trudged up the hill from the cemetery where his wife, sister,
brother, and three children were all buried, and forced open the door of his
decaying house, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that was soon to devastate his
life."

Victory is a double-edged sword

Chuter said he had mixed feelings about winning. "The first thought I had
was 'Oh, good!' The second thought I had was 'Oh, no!'"

Chuter, who has a doctorate in English literature, said he would now be
deemed totally unreliable.

Chuter said he was inspired by stories from England's North Country, a
fading industrial region, and John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath."

"The interesting thing about parody is how far you can take it before you
fall off the edge," he said in a telephone interview from London. "You begin
with a certain theme like gloom and doom and death and things and see how long
you can continue."

Bad writing has planetwide appeal.

The idea for the bad writing contest emerged in 1983, Rice said. "It
started out as kind of a lark," he said in a telephone interview.

"Universities are always having literary contests that generate a lot of
bad writing, so we decided to sponsor one of our own."

Thousands now enter the contest, with entries from as far away as Saudi
Arabia and Singapore. Rice whittles down the most promising entries and
then presents the best of the worst to a "panel of undistinguished judges"
made up of colleagues at the university.

'Best bad writing is by good people'

Crafting a winning "bad" sentence is not as easy as it might seem. It's not
just your average Joe who can come up with something truly bad, Rice said.

"We do get generally bad writers, but the best (bad) writing is by good
people," Rice said.

Other efforts commended by the judges included:

"Her breasts were like ripe strawberries, but much bigger, a completely
different color, not as bumpy, and without the little green things on top."

"George stared intently across the table which supported the golden-brown
fresh-baked cornbread with butter and sizzling cholesterol-laden bacon which
could finish blocking his previously hardened arteries at any time, into
Argerie's clear-blue eyes and realized that she knew what he knew, and she
knew that he knew what she knew, and he must practice carpe diem before
angina seized the day."

But wait, there's more!

David Hirsch of Seattle won in the Purple Prose category with this opening
line:
"Rain -- violent torrents of it, rain like fetid water from a God-sized pot
of pasta strained through a sky-wide colander, rain as Noah knew it, flaying
the shuddering trees, whipping the white capped waters, violating the sodden
firmament, purging purity and filth alike from the land, rain without mercy,
without surcease, incontinent rain, turning to intermittent showers
overnight with partial clearing Tuesday."

And Wendy Lawton of Hilmar, California, captured the children's literature
prize with:
"The greedy school bus crept through the streets devouring clumps of
children until its belly groaned with surfeit, then lumbered back to the
schoolhouse where it obligingly regurgitated its meal onto the grounds."

In keeping with the stature and dignity of the competition, winners receive
the traditional award: zilch