Jennifer Liston

I'm working my way (slowly) through Gabriele Rico's book Writing the Natural Way.

I'm quite enjoying the discipline of doing each writing exercise. The book claims to 'help unlock natural styles and storytelling abilities'. Maybe that translates to 'using the discipline of writing with the old left brain editor switched off so that creativity has a freer run'.

The author presents a technique called 'clustering' to release creative inhibition and to create links between apparently dissimilar thoughts. It's actually a version of mind-mapping, which I've used quite often, but not for writing poetry.

I'm only up to chapter five (of 14 chapters) so I'll be a while yet! What I really like is that the book is peppered with great quotes about writing, creativity and psychology from all kinds of interesting people.

Here's one:

My question is "When did other people give up the idea of being a poet?" You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?

William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl

I might share a few of the exercises from the book with you soon.

Then again, I might not.

You'll have to be very nice to me.

Posted by Jennifer Liston