Clustering

Clustering: A Writer’s Tool

Writers need ways to come up with topics. Here is one way to experiment with.

The gift of insight—of making imaginative new connections—is there for anyone who persists, experiments, and explores.

Marilyn Ferguson

In most lives insight has been accidental. We wait for it as primitive man awaited lightning for a fire. But making mental connections is our most crucial learning tool.

The essence of human intelligence is to forge links; to go beyond the given; to see patterns, relationships and context.

Marilyn Ferguson

Creation is inherently relational—there cannot be creation without interconnection.

Charles Johnson, M.D.

Novelist, master teacher John Gardner said:

Writers need some magic key for getting in touch with their secret reserves of imaginative power.

What we lack is not ideas but a direct means of getting in touch with them.

Clustering is one such magic key.

It can be one of the crucial first steps for bypassing our logical, orderly Sign-mind consciousness to touch the mental life of daydream, random thought, remembered incident, image, or sensation

Clustering can be a magic key to natural writing.

What is clustering?

It is a nonlinear brainstorming process akin to free association.

It makes an invisible design process visible through a nonlinear spilling out of lightning associations that allows patterns to emerge.

What are the results of clustering?

We naturally come up with a multitude of choices from a part of our mind where the experiences of a lifetime mill and mingle.

The Writer’s tool, Clustering accepts:

Wondering Not-knowing Seeming chaos The unknown

The writer maps an interior language as ideas begin to emerge.

Trust in the process…

It is okay not to know

Wondering is the natural state at the beginning of all creative acts, as recent brain research shows.

How to create a cluster:

Begin with a nucleus word, circled on a fresh page.

Let go and begin to flow with any current of connections that come into your head.

Write rapidly, each in its own circle, radiating outward from the center in any direction they want to go.

Frustration

As you cluster, you may experience a sense of randomness, or, if your are somewhat skeptical, an uneasy sense that it isn’t leading anywhere.

That is your logical mind wanting to get into the act to let you know how foolish you are being by not setting thoughts down in logical sequences.

Trust this natural process.

There is no right or wrong way to cluster.

Just try and see if it works for you.

Your mind knows where it is heading, even if you don’t.

Your creative mind has a wisdom of its own, shaping ends you can’t really evaluate yet.

This wisdom has nothing to do with logic.

Simply begin to write; the writing takes over and writes itself.

The technique of clustering gives you access to the patterns and associations of your Design mind.

What does clustering provide?

1. Choices from which to formulate and develop your thought

2. A focus meaningful enough to impel you to write.

Quote from a student:

Clustering brings to my mind truths I may have lost sight of.

Continue to cluster for two to three minutes or until you experience a shift from randomness to a sense that you have something to write about.

Now take out a clean sheet of paper and begin writing about what idea or vignette or pattern came about from the clustering. Write in a free manner. It is only a draft. See where this takes you.

A basic technique of natural writing

Clustering, the basic technique of natural writing, can be use to:

Generate ideas for writing of: Fiction, poems, essays, business

reports, song lyrics, even novels.

Although it is human nature to resist the unfamiliar, the unconventional, give clustering a chance.

Don’t prematurely bring down the curtain on a process that is certain to produce enormous changes in your writing, your attitude toward writing, and your assessment of your own creative powers.

In making the invisible process of your Design mind visible through clustering, you avail yourself of the rich array of choices on which natural writing thrives. Gabriele Rico, Ph.D. is a professor of

English and creative arts at San Jose State University. She lives in Chicago.