Creativity for Poets - technique 1 (and group poem)

This technique seems easy but can really produce interesting and creative results. It can be used to generate word ideas, or to think up different and innovative connections between ideas in a poem. It is best to do this as a spider diagram, which is a big circle with a word in the middle and spokes sticking out with further circles (looks like a spider!).

Step 1

First, start out with the word or concept you want to focus on for the exercise and put it in the circle in the middle of the diagram. Now think of every word you can associate with the word in the middle, no matter how bizarre the connection. In fact, the stranger and weirder the word the better. Don’t police what you’re putting down, even if it is tenuous, just collect the data. I’d suggest giving it at least 10 minutes, or a goal to get 50 word associations. You should now have the central idea surrounded by a whole list of related words.

Step 2

Choose one of the connected words you just generated which has the least obvious connection. Take a separate sheet of paper and put this in the middle, and do exactly the same word association, but make sure you forget all about the original word which started it all off on the previous sheet of paper. Just throw out words associated with the new word, again without filtering what you put down.

Step 3

Here is the interesting part. Use one of the words you generated in step 2, and apply it to the very first word/concept you put in the centre of the diagram in step 1. If you did this correctly, it should initially appear unrelated, but if you think about it for awhile you’ll start to see some interesting connections or vocabulary you could use to explain the first concept.

If you want, you can keep going and pick a word from step 3 and do the same exercise until you start to get some really unrelated words and concepts.

EXAMPLE

Step 1 - If I’m writing a poem about, say, London (first thing that came to mind) I put it in the centre of the paper and start associating. I might come up with Thames, cabs, red (phone box), St Paul’s Cathedral, Fish, Chips, Heathrow etc.

Step 2 – pick a word that isn’t immediately obvious, in this example maybe Heathrow. Put this in the centre and forget about London altogether and think about words related to Heathrow. For example, planes, runway, immigrants, visa, pollution, protesters, take off, landing, America, etc.

Step 3 – relate one or some of the words to the original concept, London. Say to yourself, how is London like a plane? It has ‘passengers’ who travel together through time, but don’t really talk to each other. Can you ‘fly’ through London on your way home, or ‘glide’ or pilot your way through? Planes are steel tubes, as are the underground trains – is there a concept to play with here for a poem. Maybe the title ‘Steel Tubes’ about life shuttling around London. You could play with the words ‘air pressure’ and pressure of living in a big city.

The key is to play with step 3 and see what you come up with. If the first word you try doesn’t work, try another or go through steps 2 and 3 again with different words. It takes a bit of practice, but you can really get some interesting associations if you use words and concepts not immediately obvious to your initial subject. A variation on this theme is to use the center concept not to come up with related words, but rather interesting vocabulary or verbs etc.

Happy to start a quick example on Steem if anyone wants to put together a group written poem. Just comment below.