Clustering

Gabriele Rico, a professor of English and Creative Arts at San Jose State University, urges us to use the simple act of writing to discover who we are and what we think. Her widely-acclaimed "clustering" technique is largely a Design mind process. This non-linear brain-storming encourages playfulness, wide instead of narrow attention, and mental flexibility. By letting Design mind associations spill onto the page, clustering makes this non-linear search for patterns visible, manipulable, and so, teachable and learnable—long before the Sign mind steps in. Once both sides of the brain have a say in the writing process, the creative potential inherent in all of us is activated. The resulting writing flows quickly and easily. She also covers the science of chaos, patterns in chaos, randomness and unpredictability as essential to the creative process, creativity as collaboration, risk-taking as a definition of creative human beings, using polarities to explore the mind, and much more. Her classic Writing the Natural Way, which sold over half a million copies, is out in a newly revised second edition.