Summary: We've all heard of them. Some of us have had the unfortunate experience of reading them. Now here's your chance to write one of your own!
What is this wuff speaking of?
Those cringingly bad masses of prose so typified by the cliché ‘d opening "It Was A Dark and Stormy Night"!
The idea is to use as many bad techniques, all the over-wrought prose, tortured analogies, nonsecquitar similes, over-used clichés as possible in a furry short story to create a ‘masterpiece" (monster-piece?) of rotten writing.
Now, we're not talking about taking the "easy way out" here, by just going for bad spelling, poor grammar, and ‘entire-story-in-a-single-paragraph' run-on text. No, this challenge is to try writing a real ‘wince and groaner' of a bad story, not just make "English 101" mistakes.
And, since it wouldn't be a real challenge if we didn't have a few rules, here they are:
1) No more than 3000 words, no less than 1000.
- You'll need enough ‘working space' to develop your monster to it's full, horrific potential, but if you carry on too long, you'll start melting your reader's brains out their ears, or send them off to the padded rooms for a nice lay-down and recovery.
2) Make at least a reasonable attempt at proper spelling, etc.
- You can use intentional poor grammar and spelling to heighten the bad effect, but I emphasize the "intentional" part. We want to be able to separate your creatively bad skills from simple mistakes.
3) (there is no rule three)
- Fnord
4) Must have a plot.
- Hackneyed, formulaic, predictable, lame, etc., are all okay (and preferred), but it has to at least move from point A to B and reach a conclusion.
That's it - the rest is up to you.
And now, the THEME. In order to make it a true challenge, we have to keep at least a modicum of continuity or we'll be trying to judge apples and oranges. So here is a theme ripe with possibility (not to mention already a subject of some pretty bad "Dark and Stormy" stories outside of this challenge):
"A lonely fur finds someone and they get together to ... "
And there you go folks! Are you up to the challenge?
Categories: Characters: None