Tonight we did an interesting exercise. We brainstormed at our table groups to come up with 10 "what-if" statements. The purpose of this exercise was help us begin to develop plots, characters, and settings for a short story that we will write for our final project in the class. This is just the beginning stage.
So, here's what we came up with for our "what-if" statements:
- What if someone walked across a frozen river?
- What if someone found a gun in a park?
- What if someone's house floated down the road?
- What if someone got sucked into an alternate reality?
- What if a doctor put someone on a chocolate only diet?
- What if the moon was made of blue cheese?
- What a little boy's hair turned green?
- What if someone suddenly became blind?
- What if someone was a gangster?
- What if someone didn't go home?
Dr. Wonka's all you-can-eat chocolate diet was all the rage. It was everywhere - endless infomercials on cable television, Internet ads popped up everywhere, and direct mail pieces going out to every home in America.
The idea was simple. You can eat any thing you want as long as it's chocolate. Only chocolate was eaten for breakfast. Chocolate was eaten for lunch. Chocolate was eaten for dinner. If you got thirsty, just drink a tall cold glass of chocolate milk. If it's cold outside, have a steaming cup of hot chocolate instead. If you did this for a month, then you would lose weight. What could be better than this?
It sounded too good to be true and the real secret to the diet was that it was too good to be true. Yes, enough people gorged themselves on so much chocolate that they threw up and did lose some weight. However, they also had to be hospitalized for dehydration.
There were many medical experts giving interviews on the Today Show and 24 hour cable news stations that warned people not to even think about trying this diet. The FDA issued a strongly worded statement warning people about the health risks of eating only chocolate. Of course, it was not really too strongly worded. The candy manufacturer's lobby made sure of that. They had dumped millions into the President's re-election campaign just to make sure he understood that the all chocolate diet was a huge boon for the chocolate industry.
Of course, every doctor in the nation could have gone on television and talked about the evils of eating only chocolate and most people would not have listened. This was the United States of America after all. People don't like to be told what to eat and what not to eat. They liked chocolate and it was their constitutional right to eat it. Certainly there was a chocolate clause in the Bill of Rights somewhere.
Furthermore, if one of America's sit-com actresses from the 1980's was telling people how she lost thirty pounds on the all-you-can-eat chocolate diet on a late-night infomercial, then it must be true. What the aging actress didn't share is that the real reason she lost all her weight was by having gastric by-pass surgery. However, who really paid attention to these kind of details? This is America - land of the free and home of the quick fix diet scheme. After all, how bad could it really be? It's just chocolate.
That's all the further I got before my time ran out. This was fun to write. I don't know exactly where the story goes from here but I have some ideas. I simply love the process of writing and seeing how the ideas unfold in my mind and on the paper. I am truly having the time of my life in this writing class.
Thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings and for being a part of my journey!
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