posted
Hmmm..I was just sitting here websurfing...and I just came up with a very, make that *extremely* unorthodox Idea. An idea so left-of-center, that if you all shoot it down, I'll perfectly understand. Here goes--
Well, you know how they have a Bad Hemmingway contest, a Faux Faulkner contest, as well as a contest as to who can write the worst first line of a novel (the famous Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, honoring the infamous 'It was a dark and stormy night' dude? *That* guy?) And how they should very well have a Poor Pynchon, Naughty Nabokov and Sh@tty Shakespeare contest along those same lines? Well, howsabout a (...drumroll...) a bad Orson Scott Card contest?
Individuals submit a 5k word Bad Scott story for the community's general laff-o-lympics perusal. Finalists and winners chosen by consensus voting. Victorious Grand Master gets his/her creation published in IGMS (no, *that* idea will *never* go over).
Bad idea? Well, it was a joke, admittedly...
[This message has been edited for crummy spelling by Nietge (edited June 12, 2006).]
[This message has been edited by Nietge (edited June 12, 2006).]
posted
The problem as I see it (okay, I won't limit it to just ONE problem) is that the reason these Bad-Hemmingway or Bad-Faulkner contests work is because they both have a distinct, and (at least, badly) imitable style. Scott's style is arguably the absence of stylistic device (generally speaking) and so, in order to imitate him, you'd have to pick one of his more broad themes. This is not something easily accomplished in a short story. You'd end up getting satire, not bad imitation.
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posted
It's also a little easier, from a political standpoint, to jab fun at DEAD authors. Living ones may object. Imitation is not always a form of flattery.
And I agree with Rahl22... one of the things I admire about Card's writing is that the style is so seamless, you don't even notice it. He has an ability to make it seem like just everyday folks talking. It's hard to grasp onto something to poke fun of.
Now, if you want to talk about a writer you can make fun of, let's open the topic up to Dan Brown... or Robert Jordan....
posted
Again, I meant it as a joke, but maybe it didn't come off all that well. Just being silly. I apologize if I ruffled any feathers.
Posts: 103 | Registered: Jun 2006
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Well, I was saying something about how Card does have a tendancy to chose very introspective character POV's, and how you could probably write something amusingly sub-literate by taking that too far. He also enjoys 'framing' ten dollar words and putting them in dialog (another element of his characterization).
Then I said something about how, despite the fact that the concept sounded workable to me, it didn't sound very interesting.
posted
I read, in Asimov's (70's I think), "The Return of the Cousins of the Dune Preacher's Mistress." It was a hoot, exaggerating Herbert's wheels-within-wheels plot intricacies in the Dune series.
I hadn't heard of the Bad Hemingway contest. I would think it would get old fast.
I'd agree, OSC's style just isn't idiosyncratic enough. Now, there HAS been on the Hatrack forum a thread on "X as OSC," X being Hemingway, Wodehouse, Seuss, whoever. Some really fun pastiches, even the ones I didn't write.
quote:Again, I meant it as a joke, but maybe it didn't come off all that well.
I don't think the SUGGESTION was particularly offensive, but IMHO the ACTION of doing so would be in bad taste, given that Hatrack.com is owned by OSC. I mean, this IS his website after all. If someone feels compelled to poke fun at Card, perhaps taking it to a different bulletin board would be more polite than roasting the author in his own backyard.
posted
Well, the first thing I thought of when I read the idea of having a bad OSC contest is how difficult it would be, like others have said, given that OSC doesn't employ many idiosyncratic devices like Faulkner and Joyce and whatever the heck the name of that "Dark and stormy night" woman is, but then I started thinking hard about the last novel I read by him, wherein a character launched into some introspective exposition and it just kept going and going and going, like I remember Papa doing chopping firewood when it was winter and our crops had failed and he couldn't find any other job but chopping wood, and how it bothered me to see an intelligent man like Papa - he had taught himself to read when he was five, according to Grandpa - a really smart cookie like Papa just busting his back chopping firewood when he could have been solving the world's problems, or at least the city's, like how the saloon in town always attracts the worst kind of people from the towns around - we don't have those kind of people in our city, not as residents anyway - and Papa always told me that the best way to fix it is to neuter all their horses while they're in there a'drinkin' and a'smokin' and a'playin' poker, and then neuter the men after they passed out, and Papa just chopped and chopped and chopped like that sentence I remember reading, and I remember my brain turning off by the time I got to the end.
And yet. And yet.
What's wrong with skewering the living?
[This message has been edited by trousercuit (edited June 12, 2006).]
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