Writing about writing—by the Write Source staff

Dr. Rico’s Magic Key

We’re all so familiar with clusters as prewriting tools that we’ve forgotten how they were originally intended to be used. In Dr. Gabriele Lusser Rico’s classic book, Writing the Natural Way, she says…

Writers need some magic key for getting in touch with these secret reserves of imaginative power. What we lack is not ideas but a direct means of getting in touch with them.

Clustering is that magic key. In fact, it is the master key to natural writing. It is the crucial first step for bypassing our logical, orderly Sign-mind consciousness to touch the mental life of daydream, random thought, remembered incident, image, or sensation.

Wow. And I thought clusters were mainly for selecting a topic. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Rico describes clustering as a nonlinear process of graphing a “storm center of meanings,” exploring those meanings, and from them launching into natural writing. She suggests that the writer begin by writing a word or phrase in the center of a piece of paper and circling it. Then, as rapidly as possible, the writer should write down whatever associations come from that central nucleus, circling these as well and connecting them. The writer should keep going until he or she suddenly knows what to write.

Skeptical, I tried this exercise—and was stunned by the results. I created a cluster centering on the word “AFRAID” (click it for a larger view):

In two minutes, I had ventured down numerous tangents and into some very interesting territory. In fact, I suddenly knew what to write. In the next two minutes, here’s what I wrote:

No one wants to be afraid, to live in fear. It is a heart-pounding state, juiced on adrenaline, a breath-constricted closet. To be afraid is to recognize the fragility of life—but therefore to recognize life. Fear may make us meek—hiding and inheriting the earth after the bullies have all bashed out their brains. It may even save us altogether. Think of the fearless dodo bird, clubbed to extinction by Western seamen. Think of Temple Grandin, whose fear taught her how to survive, autistic in a world of “neurotypicals.” And now she designs cattle-processing yards to take the fear out of cows so that they walk blithely beneath the maul. I do not want to walk blithely beneath it. I will keep my fear.

While writing, I had the uncanny feeling that I was simply taking dictation for a voice that spoke to me, telling me what to write. Writers have often named that voice “the muse,” but if Rico is right, that voice is actually the subconscious mind at last getting hold of the microphone.

When I told a colleague of mine about my experiment, he did one of his own, rapidly populating a cluster until he knew just what to say. In mere minutes, here’s the cluster he developed:

And here’s the poem that came from it:

For Chuck, at Eighty

This is for you, Chuck,
my stepfather,
squatted like an Indian

beside the open brake drum
of your El Camino truck

pausing to smoke and
offer advice

which I couldn’t take

I was a roaring fire, a boisterous wind
the rushing of waters

You seemed impenetrable as stone

But I know now
you are a cliffside dwelling
with a deep well

an abode of firelight
and the laughter of love

When I left that place
I carried a stone
deep inside

and came the day
I built my own cliffside dwelling
in the fashion I had been shown

Now my children carry stones

—Lester Smith, 6 August 2008

With his cluster and poem in hand, my colleague came to me wearing the same lightning-struck look I had worn. “This really works!” he said.

Take four minutes of your life and try it. Write a word or phrase in the middle of a piece of paper, circle it, and then rapidly write down all the connections that come to mind. Keep going until you know just what to write. Then write—and come back here to post your work.

—Rob King