I’m holed up in the guest bedroom of my cousin’s sweet house in the Tennessee countryside. The window faces a deep ravine packed with trees lush with late summer green. Rain beats the roof, a reminder of our topsy-turvy world where Oregon is drier and Tennessee wetter.

When I became a climate-change refugee this summer to escape Oregon wildfire risk and smoky air, I felt the pull of separation from home as an ache, even as I enjoyed the reunions and laughter.

Homing is a query to the self, a quest for comfort, an orientation toward alignment. It’s a useful feeling to tune in to, because it tells us how close or far we are to the resting place of our own truth.

If someone urges me to be a way I’m really not, I feel it as a separation from the home of my true self, as a warning.

This homing feeling is essential when I write novels. I sit in my writing chair and find the place inside where I feel so at home I activate a portal to the place where Story lives, a bigger-than-me homeland. I feel for the story that wants to be told, feel for how it wants to be told, and focus my attention there to try to capture the signal of truth.

This concept of homing beats at the center of the story of my life in spirals and across dimensions. To explore the ripples, I created a cluster map in my journal (see the photo below). I started in the middle with a single circle and wrote the word HOMING in it. Without thinking too much, I wrote and circled connected ideas as they came to me, following and writing subsequent ideas, like stepping stones, to see where they led. Some stones led back to others, which I discovered as the page filled. Along the way, I found surprises, like how the word belongings for the objects we own includes the word belonging. I love that.

Clustering is like a divining rod. I use it to bring my secret thoughts to light—and not only about writing. Creating and poring over cluster maps helps me find paths through sticky issues and gives me clarity.

Gabriele Lusser Rico writes about clustering in her book Writing the Natural Way:

“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.”

Is there a stuck place or a worry topic poking at you to get your attention? What might you discover if you wrote it in the middle of a page and started to explore with circles and lines and the words in your fingertips? Share your discoveries with me, if you like, via the contact page.

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Alice Archer is the author of the literary romance novels Everyday History and The Infinite Onion. You can subscribe to her newsletter to receive a free story, notification of new articles and books, and more.

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