Writer wins award for bad prose

• By GEORGE MORRIS
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jul 3, 2009 - Page: 1D

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

Writing well is how Lynn Lamousin, of Baton Rouge, makes a living. But when she decided to write badly, she fabricated a winner.

Lamousin, a freelance copywriter, received a “dishonorable mention” in the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Results of the annual contest, in which contestants write intentionally bad opening sentences to imaginary novels, were announced this week.

Her prize came in the Detective category for this pulp crime novel opener:

“Darnell knew he was getting hung out to dry when the D.A. made him come clean by airing other people’s dirty laundry; the plea deal was a new wrinkle and there were still issues to iron out, but he hoped it would all come out in the wash — otherwise he had folded like a cheap suit for nothing.”

While such prose might make her former English teachers at St. Joseph’s Academy and LSU cringe, Lamousin is proud of it.

“It’s kind of hard to write crappy copy on command,” Lamousin said Thursday.

Lamousin, 42, typically writes articles for employee publications at companies like Coca-Cola, FedEx, ATT and Cox Communications. She said she has written about 50 or 60 magazine stories for publications in Georgia, Florida and South Carolina. She also was the screenwriter for “The Lady from Sockholm,” a movie that stars sock puppets and spoofs classic film noirs.

“I’m very much known for the bad puns,” she said.

Which is just fine with the folks at Bulwer-Lytton. The international literary parody contest, in its 27th year, is named for Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who infamously began the novel “Paul Clifford” with a phrase often repeated by the “Peanuts” beagle Snoopy: “It was a dark and stormy night.”

This was Lamousin’s first time to enter the contest.

“I’m going to win one year,” she said, laughing. “I’m determined to be the worst writer in America.”

Easier said than done. The grand prize winner was David McKenzie, of Federal Way, Wash., who wrote this howler:

“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the ‘Ellie May,’ a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”