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Gabriele Rico: Breaking a four-year writer's block
Gabriele Rico wrote her dissertation on clustering, a technique she had developed while teaching students to write such things as poetry and essays. She wanted to write a book when she finished her dissertation in 1976, but she couldn't get started.
She continued experimenting with clustering and subsequent steps in the writing process for four years. She finally decided to try to break her block by clustering.
Rico recalls sitting down on the floor with a big sheet of butcher paper and putting natural writing in a circle in the center. Within a few minutes she had covered the paper with associations. Looking it over, she saw the language she needed, and she began to see potential chapters. She color coded the words into 12 chapters.
She then made 13 clusters, one for the whole and one for each chapter. Each cluster fit on a standard 8.5x11 sheet. She wrote a one-paragraph description of each chapter and a one-page book proposal and mailed it that same day. Three days later she had a book contract for the first edition of Writing the Natural Way.
Bio
Clustering unleashes creativity, speeds writing process
Gabrielle Rico
A professor of English and creative arts at San Jose State University, Gabriele Rico lectures widely on the application of brain research to writing, learning and the creative process.
She developed clustering in her doctoral dissertation at Stanford University and has given intensive creativity workshops to such corporate organizations as Apple Computer, Hewlett Packard and Sun Microsystems. For information on workshops, contact her at larico@enteract.com.
Her two best-known books are Writing the Natural Way, which has sold half a million copies (a review of the new edition appears in the April issue), and Pain and Possibility: Writing Your Way through Personal Crisis.
Her newest book, Re-creations: Inspiration from the Source (Absey Press, 2000), describes a process enabling participants to write easily and powerfully in less than three minutes.
Honored as President's Scholar in 1986, she was selected Teacher/Scholar in 1993.
For more information, visit her Web site: www.gabrielerico.com.
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