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Bam!
7th July 2004, 12.17pm

I had a late one last night, hanging out with my Bam Slam teammates Evelyn, George and Simon (working titles for the team name include "The Real Winners 2004" and "Five is a Four Letter Word") while we planned our approach for the upcoming poetry slam competition we're in as part of the whole week of gigs that Sleepers (that's two mentions in two entries I know, but it's not gratuitous, it's well within context) is presenting as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival. The slam's organised into three rounds. Round one is a two-person piece. Round two is a solo piece, with the performer chosen randomly from the four of us. Round three is a group piece. So after a little bit of wordy limbering up (one game of exquisite corpse and one of alphabet sentence) George suggested that the best way to approach a group performance piece was to write in different characters' voices. We all agreed and started brainstorming and word-mapping the kind of characters we might use, and what kind of scenario we'd place them in.

It was a long and convoluted bouncing of ideas, but after three hours we finally managed to nut out something reasonably coherent and satisfying. I probably shouldn't reveal too much, since the discussion is still officially covered by the Non-Disclosure Agreement we all signed. Suffice it to say that if earlier that day you'd told us that we would be writing in the voices of an ex-alcoholic hippie busdriver, the ghost of an astronaut in search of her foot, a grumpy lavender bush and a bunch of teenagers called "the patchouli gang", we would have responded with the requisite amount of incredulity (almost rhymes with "patchouli"). Maybe the lateness of the evening contributed to the ridiculousness of the scenario we ended up with, but as Simon pointed out, you have to respect the fact that we didn't reject a single idea that was brought to the table. If nothing else, the story we're going to tell is inclusive. There may even be a moral hidden in there somewhere. I'll let you know when it's written.

I still don't know the difference between a brainstorm and a word-map, though.

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