A Line of Pure Piffle

Spik’s offering was wondrously, tantalisingly, mesmerisingly bad: “Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped ‘Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.’ ” “It’s challenging to write something that’s intentionally bad,” said Spik, from Washington. “You have to know the mechanics of English to be able to throw a monkey wrench into it.”

The competition is named after Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, a 19th-century English writer whose novel Paul Clifford opens with the immortal line that most people associate with Snoopy: “It was a dark and stormy night.”