To write or not to write...

I'm thinking of writing a children's story book. Like many parents, I have learnt the fine skill of making up stories on the fly by blending well known stories together to produce somewhat abstract mutant variants of the originals.

In my version of The Three Pigs, the wolf is arrested at the end for attempted breaking and entering and locked up with his Grandma eating cousin from Red Riding Hood. This all started when Ms R began to confuse various stories and started to tell me goodnight tales to put herself to sleep. Some are just plain bizarre and best not to delve too deeply into her (nearly) 4 year old head. Lets just say that The Three Bears were seriously pissed at Goldilocks and she won't be eating their porridge again.

All good stories start with a cracking good first line; half the battle is picking that vital paragraph and I was reminded today of the infamous "It was a dark and stormy night" from the novel "Paul Clifford" by Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton. The context was from the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest where budding writers look to create the worst possible first paragraph of an imaginary book.

This years winner, will appeal to petrol heads everywhere:

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands,the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

Oh, yes baby.

Some of the Children's Literature awards are a good example of what to avoid. Get the full run-down here.

For those of you into bad sex writing, these awards will make you scream with pleasure or make you vomit. Either way, this will give you a taster of the dross on display:

The Food of Love by Anthony Capella
(Timewarner)
She felt strange and wild. Her body was just a collection of organs. She was blood and plumbing, like any other creature, and there was nothing that was forbidden about any of it. She gnawed on Tomasso ravenously, like an animal plundering a carcass, and when she had had enough of that she swung her leg over him, like a rider swinging into a saddle, and galloped.

Enjoy.