"For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss – a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil." So begins Molly Ringle’s latest short story, the winning submission to San Jose State University’s Bulwer-Lytton competition. The prize, whose name recalls 19th century politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton, recipient of the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for poetry whilst a Trinity student, and the wordsmith responsible for such moralizing nuggets as ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’, rewards the worst opening sentence written in America each year. To be fair, Ringle’s romantic sketch is a brilliant performance. Beginning with the ridiculousness of each character’s exotic name, the prose rockets off into a simile more bizarre than any I encountered in my study of Part 1 English. But it also provides an insight into an alternate idea of literature, one that takes its energy from a tolerance of mistakes, disorder and even embarrassment.

On the left of the Atlantic, as Vernon Lott’s forthcoming debut film Bad Writing reveals, artistic failure is being celebrated and understood in a deeper way than it has been until today. With ‘bad’ meaning not morally evil, necessarily, but more like able to work mischief against cultural standards of taste, this spirited new documentary charts Lott’s maturation from a wannabe poet to a 35 year old Creative Writing graduate and professional film-maker. Tinged with suburban melancholy, the journey begins after he exhumes his adolescent attempts at genius from his mother’s basement and, upon re-reading them in their horrendous entirety, chooses not to burn the evidence but to expose it to members of the literary establishment and viewing public. During an odyssey which takes him from Idaho to New York City, Lott shows his work to and endures criticism from the likes of George Saunders, Yusef Kumonyakka, and Margaret Atwood who cautions him forcefully "there is no rule that says you’ll get steadily better".

For Lott, who meets the camera with a goofy charm reminiscent of early Michael Moore, the project itself happened as a kind of fluke. "It was originally intended to be a short", he admits when I ask about his switch from the page to the screen. "But the next thing I know, the USA Today blog and the New York Times had posted the trailer online, so I quickly decided to make the jump." It’s this impulsive approach thaw also accounts for some of his worst imaginative jumps. Fluent in little but self-torture, Lott writes in a characteristic early poem:

I vomited blood and now I’ve tasted myself
The blasphemy should be locked away with my mind
In the prison of waste that I smell
but cannot see.

Whatever these lines mean, and no matter how dreadful they sound, my question about the circumstances under which they were written prompts a response as heartfelt as it is outrageous: "I’d not even completed high school. But this only added to the romance of writing", Lott states with typical candor. "I read a lot of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and was more enamored by their tragic lives than by their writing. I thought I was eventually going to become a gunrunner like Rimbaud – only I hoped to avoid losing a leg. To me, this was exotic and what writers should be like: the poet as seer."

Fortunately, however, Bad Writing leads out of such foolery and towards more important questions of how changes in teaching and publishing practices are determining what counts as good art. Reflecting on his time spent enrolled on academic writing programmes, Lott suggests optimistically how "When you move writing into the university there becomes this fear that we’re institutionalizing our creativity; but when you flip it around it becomes this urge to make schools more creative places."

Indeed, one of the writing workshop’s secret weapons, as opposed to the traditional English degree, is perhaps its ability to act as a space for imperfect student writing to receive attention. Identifying and learning from the errors made by one’s peers is arguably a more happy and constructive method than feeling overawed by the airbrushed canon of classic literature. Similar concessions to the low-brow have even begun to feature within Cambridge’s current syllabus, as the post-1995 paper begins to incorporate the work of J.K.Rowling and Stephanie Meyer in an effort to cause debates about how best to define our plot-heavy, populist narratives.

But this new pluralism in our reading habits, the collusion of high and low, has occurred in sharp contrast to developments in how books are being printed and sold. Throughout Bad Writing no issue looms larger than that of modern technology, and while the growth of social networking is giving us unprecedented access to unconventional thought and speech, other media have become more refined and selective. Speaking about his experience filming behind the scenes at an independent poetry press, Lott realizes that "The technology industry is based upon what they call ‘scalable models’. In design for Kindle you have to try to find this one-size-fits-all approach, which is a problem, and particularly with poetry where you’re trying to capture some essences of the individual human voice". And yet in spite of these problems - both personal, creative and technological – in which the film is clearly rooted, with Bad Writing Vernon Lott’s own voice really resonates. He shows that although it’s aesthetically worse, bad writing is no easier a phenomenon to explain, doing so in a meandering, poignant, funny film.