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 . For final fine-tuning you will need Roget's Thesaurus .