Aaaaaannnnndddddd…gotcha!!! Yeah, I gotcha…you got got and you got got good, even if you don’t want to admit it. You took one look at the title of this thing and you thought about the orgy going on in your game cabinet…Ping Pong Pornography happening right in your home!! And maybe even involving paddles!! Come on, folks…this is me…not Irish Rose (who could probably really go places with that title) or OneToeJeff, who could take that title and run a mile and a half with it barefoot and in his jammies any day of the week…’specially if he had a little Doobie and maybe a little Debbie…
No, this tale is not about love and sex on the game table…this is about part of my True North, which would be writing; specifically the kind I had in a particular class in college (University of Utah…Go, Utes!!). The class was Creative Writing, and the professor was a lovely older lady whose name I can’t remember, and couldn’t pronounce if I did…she was from Russia, or Latvia, or Estonia…somewhere in there. I do know that in her spare time, she was trying to perfect a beer milk shake, as an accompaniment to her shrimp ice cream…but that’s a whole ‘nother story…In class, she spent her time coming up with creative subjects for her subjects to write about.
“Your assignment today class, is 5 pages, typewritten, single-spaced on the subject of…(You ready?)…The Sex Life of a Ping Pong Ball.” Yeah, I don’t need to write ’bout no Ping Pong Sex because…hey…been there, done that…and I got a “B”. I would have gotten a higher grade, but my typewriter was an old manual, and didn’t come with Spellcheck.
“OK, class, today we will assume that I am blind…totally blind, been that way since birth…never saw nuthin’ in my life…Please give me 3 pages, typewritten, single-spaced…and describe to me, so that I can understand it…the color blue.” Yep, I know…double negative and all in there…but that was the way she talked, not the way she wrote. Oh, and when you read that, read it in a very heavy Eastern European accent…there, that’s better. By the way, I got an “A” on that one (apparently, I learned how to spell by then), and, no, I don’t want to repeat that particular assignment.
What she was doing, of course, is showing us that ANY subject can be handles in a creative way…now, none of us were going to run out and write a novel about blue Ping Pong balls screwing any more than we were going to spend time vacuuming the ceiling. But when we did write, we knew that anything was possible…and could be made believable.
Obviously, creative writing can be non-fiction as well as fiction…you could write creatively about the sex life of a Mongolian Gerbil as easily as you could about the sex life of a magnifying glass. One of my favorite examples of creative non-fiction fiction would be “The Agony and The Ecstasy” by Irving Stone; it’s the life story of Michaelangelo, and while the facts of his life are non-fiction, obviously, the thoughts and words of the people are entirely made up. J.K. Rowling took a common, ordinary, average, everyday, run-of-the-mill nerd, dropped him (probably on his head) into a school called Hogwarts, and made about a billion dollars in the process. Man, I need to go find me a nerd to write about…
At any rate…while writing is my passion, as stated in a previous blog, creative writing is IT for me…the one thing I always want to do…except now, when I really want a beer milk shake…fortunately, she perfected her recipe before the class ended. If you’ll excuse me, the beer is waiting…
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