Paper-Hack Writer
Or, How I Officially Became the Worst Writer in the World

By Dave Zobel ’84

It wasn’t the Nobel committee calling last year, but I knew there had been a dreadful mistake just the same. The voice on the other end of the phone that July afternoon was congratulating me on my writing.

It seemed I had just been named the most atrocious writer in the world.

Inferiority is in the eye of the beholder, of course; but in my case the beholder was the 2004 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (BLFC), the annual competition named for the Victorian novelist who first penned the immortal cliché “It was a dark and stormy night.” The contest rules are the soul of brevity: Each entry must be the opening sentence to the worst novel never written. Exactly one sentence long. Original. Unpublished And awful.

Unintentionally bad writing comes naturally to us all, I daresay. Surely even an infinite number of monkeys banging away at their laptops could never match the trash-production capacity of Homo sapiens pseudoauctor (or Desktop-publishing man). The trick, however, is doing it on demand, and thus it was with a sensation of prompt, gentle relief that I had managed to squeeze out my contest entry just in time for the April 15 due date:

“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.”

Sand vein? Ramon? I have no idea where any of that came from. I think Voltaire once said something similar about the Holy Roman Empire (though presumably in a different context), and I vaguely recall one rather lively evening of fish cleaning, but beyond that the precise circumstances of my moment of inspiration are a blur.

I do know that I, like Voltaire, harbored no illusions of winning any prize for bad writing and that I was only following the example of Nabokov, who wrote mainly to amuse himself, and of Tolstoy, who wrote mainly to annoy his wife.

“Every frustrated writer,” says Zobel, seen above wallowing in memorabilia from his Caltech days, “should have his own milieu— preferably a reasonably portable one.”

“Badly written, but close enough.” —Grader’s note, midterm exam, 1981

Those five stretches of ellipses in my winning sentence are part of the original entry; no text has been left out. The reason they’re there is that I was finally responding to a suggestion made more than two decades ago by my Caltech history professor, Peter Ward Fay.

From day one of my freshman year, Fay had recognized in my rampant prose and unbridled punctuation the muddy footprints of a truly heavy-handed metaphor mixer. At the bottom of my very first humanities quiz, he had gently reproved, “I think you over-comma a bit.” Later, he filled the last page of one of my term papers with a long and thoughtful commentary that acknowledged up front that “a person’s style is his own” before making a recommendation that plunged directly to the core of my affliction.
The essence of his advice: “Write more simply.”

He cited a few examples from my own work and then directed my attention to Elementary Principle 17 from Strunk and White’s classic Elements of Style: “Omit Needless Words.”

Granted, it took nearly a quarter-century for the lesson to sink in. Still, there I sat last April, wrestling with one truly abominable sentence that was a jumble of licentiousness and sand veins and commas and vowing to rip out everything but the sand veins. But what to insert in place of all those commas? Ellipses won the coin toss.

As for Omit Needless Words, I mulled over that one too, well aware that by rights that rule ought to have reduced my entire sentence to one big fat ellipsis. I made one or two uninspired excisions, tacked on a lackluster cover letter, and clicked Send.

Fittingly, the “Dark and Stormy Night” competition shares its April 15 deadline with another Outrageous Fiction contest, although in honor of the BLFC’s origins in academia, late entries are both expected and accepted. In that same vein, the winners are announced on no particular date—just whenever the judges finally come up for air.

The reward for my uncommon punctuality (and punctuation) arrived promptly, in the form of a simple form letter straight from bulwer-lytton.com. Its affable equivocation—“Your entry has arrived and will receive the attention it deserves”—was all the editorial validation I could ever have wished for.

Dave Zobel ((left), winner of the 2004 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad writing, is congratulated by Scott Rice, the San Jose State University English professor who created the contest in 1982. Zobel’s deliberately execrable prose was plucked from more than 5,000 entries in the annual competition.

“In the future, someone will misquote me every fifteen minutes.”—Andy Warhol (doubtful)

“You are a finalist in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. What can you tell us about yourself?”

That terse e-mail limped into my in-box one late-summer morning. “Hey!” I whooped. “Someone thinks I write lousy fiction!” Half hoping that the message might be either misdirected or spam, I replied with what I took to be a terribly clever press release, which the contest’s PR department promptly rejected as completely inadequate. “Hey!” I whooped. “Someone thinks I write lousy press releases, too!”

Lest others cry beginner’s luck, I must say that I had been submitting Bulwer-Lytton entries for several years with the hope of finding out how abysmal a writer I truly was, but never with an expectation of capturing anything more than a Dishonorable Mention. You don’t need to have taken AMa 95c at Caltech twice (as I of all people should know) to figure that with over 5,000 entries a year, the probability of winning is exceedingly small.

Yet within a weekend, and with no further effort whatsoever on my part, I somehow morphed from finalist to Grand Prize winner. And the commotion began.

The AP sent a photographer over—a Pulitzer winner, in case a miracle was needed. BBC Radio interviewed me during what can only be called their “American Freaks Hour.” Even local cable access featured me. I felt like the schnook in Chekhov’s short story “Joy,” delighted at having been run over by a horse while drunk because “the newspapers only write about famous people, and now there’s something in them about me!”

Evidently I had solved the conundrum once posed by the witty and alluring Sandra Tsing Loh ’83: “How does one make the evening news without the benefit of having anything important to say?”

Everyone wanted to know how I would spend the official Grand Prize. (As a matter of fact, I returned all $250 of it to the judges, on the assumption that they needed it more than I did.) And everyone wanted to know why I had mentioned Martha Stewart.

At the time I scribbled the piece, the embattled cuisinartiste was the pet of the Net, and her recent trial for obstruction of justice was providing plenty of blogger fodder. But let me say it yet again: I never intended to mock another’s misfortune. That both Ms. Stewart and I spent weeks brooding over our appalling sentences is nothing more than coincidence.

The simple truth is that I brought her in rather late in the process, and only because I sensed that my brief narrative needed a strong female archetype in a cookery setting. In short, the explanation is much more Freudian than schadenfreudian.

“I’ll award you a bonus point for this, but it doesn’t have anything (much) to do with the question.”—Margin notation, problem set, 1981

The late and great-hearted Peter Fay, who charitably deemed my writing style “just a touch heavy and portentous for my taste” but was willing to nurture it as far as he could bear to, would not (I’m sure) be in the least surprised at my taking first place in a bad-writing contest.

In this he would doubtless be joined by a host of other Caltech faculty and TAs, the many underappreciated souls who suffered for years through my postadolescent prose. Here and there on the yellowed term papers, reports, and exams now moldering in my garage lurk such red-penciled observations as: “Clever but irrelevant”; “An out-of-control essay”; “This is much more text than necessary.”

On one of my efforts, a professor noted sadly, “My impression is that this bobs around a lot.” On another she confessed herself “irritated that you didn’t seem to say clearly where you were headed with this.”
Ah, but one must be careful what one wishes for, inasmuch as certain professors discovered only too clearly where my thoughts were headed—over and over again.

For instance, given two pages to address the question “What is Asia?” I ebulliently vowed to analyze 10 distinct aspects of the continent, including “the geographical, political, religious, societal, . . . anthropic, . . . self-impressionistic. . . .” (Even today, I’m still not sure what some of those categories mean.) “Let us deal with each of these in turn,” I effervesced, prompting the professor to gasp (in the margin), “Golly, Dave! In a couple of pages?”

And only a bloody-minded veneration of the old saw “Tell them what you’re going to tell them; tell it to them; then tell them what you told them” can account for this finale to my very first freshman lab report: “In conclusion, let us summarize the basic features of this experiment—what was performed as well as what was learned. . . .”

Yes, let us! But I then went on to wax pedantic on precisely neither of those topics: “In fin, the experiment was quite successful—materially and educationally. . . . [T]he experiment was enjoyable, the data surprisingly accurate, and the lab experience invaluable.” The lab handout I deemed “adequately enlightening—and the TA a hundred times moreso [sic].”

Tactfully ignoring the glittering sycophancy, the grader’s patient response went straight to the heart of my neurosis: “Just tell me the specifics. . . . Don’t feel you have to justify everything that happens.”

I failed to learn the lesson, however, and spent most of my senior year, now a TA myself, mercilessly filling the margins of innocent students’ problem sets with entire paragraphs of blustery irrelevant commentary.

“I’ve made this [letter] such a long one only because I hadn’t the time to make it shorter.”— Blaise Pascal

As the alert reader may by now have realized, prolixity is my affliction. But perhaps I’m not alone. There must be a reason no Bulwer-Lytton entry can be longer than one sentence. Call it a “mercy rule,” instituted to preserve the sanity of English professor Scott Rice of San Jose State University, who came up with the idea of the contest in 1982 as a refuge for all the dreck that would otherwise clutter more traditional competitions.

Despite this simplest of regulations, Rice tells me that every year he and his fellow judges fill several dumpsters with misdirected novelettes that would be much better suited to no-word-limit competitions like the Imitation Hemingway or the Faux Faulkner. And for those entrants who endeavor to stretch the single-sentence restriction by writing the way most people talk, the BLFC web page contains the dire warning, “You go beyond 50 or 60 words at your peril.”

Unfortunately, brevity has its costs. The shortest sentence I ever wrote on a Caltech exam was the flawlessly jejune “Price is price,” which drew from the grader the sneering annotation: “This is really good! Do you have any more Cosmic Insights to share with us?”

Alas, no, for it seems I am cursed with an unusually high words-to-insights ratio. Thus, having run out of ideas midway through a “compare and contrast” evaluation of Impressionist masterpieces, I fumbled my way into “Any further analysis would only repeat the individual aspects of each painting as given above in the separate discussions,” and ground to a halt. The professor discreetly remarked that I was “somewhat flailing around for what to discuss.”

Most honest of all, though, was the long-suffering TA who, having waded through one of my more convoluted ramblings on an economics midterm, observed in block capitals in the margin, “I THINK YOU’RE B*** S****ING HERE!” (asterisks mine)

His “I think” pleased me enormously. Could it be that he was giving me the benefit of the doubt?

“A very competent fellow whom, however, I rarely saw . . . though I do not complain.”—First-term freshman-year progress report, 1980

Having been saddled with the title “World’s Wretchedest Writer,” where do I go from here? Is there more to the story? Is romance really the sand vein of life? And . . . what about Ramon?

Surely (some have suggested) my riveting opener ought to be—must be—followed by an enthralling, enrapturing, utterly engrossing 500-page novel. And who better to write it? Indeed, various relatives of mine (mainly the ones who funded my college education) have confessed that the very thought gives them the shivers.

But how to select a texture and tone for this torrid tome? Or even a topical title? Who’s Tarry Now? Her Offal Romance? The Deveinci Cookbook? An Affair to Dismember?

Any and all suggestions are welcome and will of course be dealt with appropriately.

But please . . . keep them to one sentence.

Manhattan Beach, California, software developer Dave Zobel has finally stopped pinning all his early-retirement hopes on the film rights to Dave Zobel’s Bent Book of Boatspeak. His NPR commentary on his fleeting figment of Bulwer-Lytton fame can be heard here.