Exercise: Spider Diagrams

Spider diagrams, the bane of my secondary school existence! I've always found them deeply frustrating because I hardly ever manage to come up with unexpected thoughts or ideas (those with appended question marks, in this case), so most of the time I would just try to intuit what the teacher was looking for and write that. It seems to me that we just used to call them brainstorms. The playground urban legend was that the word was considered too non-PC.

These obviously get more orderly and nuanced as I progress towards 'Angry', the last word. That doesn't seem to be a function of how difficult I found each word to generate content for, but rather a matter of getting accustomed to the format. I think the hardest was 'Childhood', as I was a dull, miserable child and have so few concrete memories of my early life. Other than that, once I approached gestalt & semi-fictionalised experiences, none of them seemed particularly difficult.

Previously I hadn't examined the rationale behind the way I fill in spider diagrams, but looking at these my approach seems clearly a narrative one, fuelled by storytelling "What next...? And then...?" questions, as if a camera is panning along a scene for me. Walking along the beach, for example, we look down and see towels and deckchairs. I also notice I tend to skip over some useful and obvious words--for instance children and wind are both missing from 'Seaside'--because I tend to take them as read.