I sometimes start my fiction-writing class off with an icebreaking exercise stolen from NPR’s Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me. I call it “Bluff the Class” (cf. “Bluff the Listener”), and its purpose is to demonstrate to students that we all have a certain storytelling talent at our fingertips—we can make up a fake outrageous news story in 10 minutes or less. The exercise is similar to the parlor game Dictionary, in which players often discover their other talent, for creating fake dictionary definitions.
I’m not sure why I like these forays so much, except that they reveal the creative force of mundane categories. Which brings me to my current favorite: the Avery Durable View Binder With 2-Inch Durable Turn Ring, currently rated 4 stars on Amazon, with almost 1,200 reviews. The first hundred or so, from 2010-11, tout the advantages of the binder in what now seem like…