Do you have a favorite joke you'd like to rewrite into the form of a heroic ballad, but you have no poetic talent? Hey, no problem! It's really easy!

For starters, make sure your joke can be retold without any racial or ethnic slurs. A heroic ballad is no place for scummy slurs that not only degrade the heroic impact but decrease the number of readers who would derive proper entertainment value, not to mention that ethnic jokes are dorky.

Now, prepare your workspace. It must be as messy as possible. Total chaos is ideal. Tip over several pieces of furniture, take half the books off the book shelves and spread them around opened up to random pages, dump out the wastebaskets onto the floor, whatever it takes. If you're married to a neat-freak you will need to explain very thoroughly but with the greatest of kindness to your spouse that chaos is the ultimate source of all creativity.

Make sure you have the necessary resources. Since a heroic ballad is supposed to rhyme, you will need a rhyming dictionary. Originality is not necessary; in fact it is rather frowned upon in heroic balladry, so you can probably get a few good lines out of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. For final fine-tuning you will need Roget's Thesaurus. Any other dictionary or encyclopedia you happen to have around will also come in handy. Make sure you have a vast quantity of scratch paper. Don't waste new paper. Any old stuff will do: back sides of junk mail, last year's term papers in some class you hated, whatever. Get plenty of pens and pencils because you're going to break a few in the throes of rampant creativity. A few beginners might be tempted to write poetry in Microsoggy Weird, but no veteran balladeer would consider such heresy.

As soon as you're ready to start writing, pour yourself a big drink, preferably a double Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster on the rocks. Writing a heroic ballad is a spiritual activity and you need to fulfill yourself with spirits. At this point, make sure the room is well padded and check your appointment book to make sure you will not need to operate a vehicle or do anything sane and rational for the next several days. People more poetic than myself have suggested drugs other than booze to stimulate the creative hormones, but I have no first-hand knowledge of their benefits. Besides, I don't want to get my tender tushypoo into the wringer by recommending illegal stuff on my intermuck page.

Now, after a couple of big slurps of your drink, designate one sheet of paper as the Last Page and write the punch line of your joke at the bottom. This will be the last line of your ballad. It is important that this be done first, while some of your brain cells are still functioning. The punch line must be precisely worded for maximum impact of the joke, and it is needed for setting the rhyme and meter scheme for the whole ballad.

Take another slurp of your drink and select a sheet of paper to be your First Page. In the top half of the page write down all the trite and hackneyed beginnings you can think of; stuff like: In Days of Old when Knights were Bold, or: In a Far Away Place with a Strange Sounding Name, or: There was a Dark and Stormy Knight, or: Once Upon a Time when Chocolate Bars were a Dime. Remember, originality is to be disdained in heroic balladry, especially for first lines.

Next, in the bottom half of the page, hastily scribble down all the ways you can think of to set the scene of your story. Supplement your creativity with more slurps of your drink, as necessary. Scribble, slurp, scribble, slurp, you get the pattern. Now, go back through the whole page and cross out everything that doesn't rhyme, and Presto! Your first verse is complete!

At this point, relax with a few more slurps of your drink and return to your Last Page, the one that has your punch line at the bottom. Fill up the rest of the page with stupid-sounding phrases that lead up to the punch line, cross out everything that doesn't rhyme, and Voila! Your last verse is finished! Your drink, at this point, should also be finished, so go fix yourself another one.

Now for the intervening verses. Scribble down the joke as fast as you can, each sentence on a separate sheet of paper, slurping your drink as appropriate. Remember the creative cadence: scribble, slurp, scribble, slurp, ... etc. Go back through and rewrite each sentence in as many different ways as you can think of. Re-word everything over and over again, referring to your various reference books as necessary. Fix yourself a new drink whenever you run dry.

Finally, arrange all the pages in order, go through and cross out everything that doesn't rhyme, re-copy what's left, and, Lo and Behold! Your heroic ballad is all done! Several days later, after you sober up enough to remember your Geocities account password, you can type your wondrous creation onto your home page. See how easy that was!

Enter a bad writing contest.