From The Guardian (UK):
A sentence comparing a kiss to the sucking of a very thirsty gerbil has won Seattle-based novelist Molly Ringle the world's worst writing contest.
Ringle, who says she only writes bad fiction when she fails at good fiction, took the Bulwer-Lytton prize for the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels yesterday with: "For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss – a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."
...Ringle, the author of the published novel The Ghost Downstairs, in which the romance between a nurse and a houseboy is played out against growing paranormal activity, is the 28th winner of the contest. "I feel quite ridiculous. But there are definitely worse ways to get 15 minutes of fame," she wrote on her blog.
The author told the Seattle Times that she had been inspired to write her winning sentence as she nursed her infant son. "Something about his attitude and posture ... It reminded me of those guinea pigs we used to have as kids," she said. "I've asked myself, probably belatedly, is that what I want to be famous for? But hopefully people in the publishing world know it's all in the name of comedy."
And anyway, she added, "you kind of have to have a certain amount of skill to write a sentence so bad it would win. You have to work at it."
Contest judge Scott Rice, a professor at San Jose State University, praised her "outlandishly inappropriate comparison" to the paper. "It is a send-up of writers who try too hard to be original, and it is a send-up of those revolting couples whose public displays of affection make them poster children for celibacy," he said
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