TextTree

A solo word-association game

Solo word association is a game where you go from one word to whatever it brings to mind, then to the next, chaining them together. It has the shape of a game, but the aim is practice — getting used to the act of having ideas.

• Get used to having ideas at all — no hesitation, no judging, just get them out
• Get used to drawing on your own knowledge and experience — reel in words stored deep in memory, hand over hand along the thread of association

Open ThinkTray (.tt.svg) and put one card in the middle. Turn whatever comes to mind into cards and keep spreading them out in every direction. In the demo above, branches grow from “Travel” to “Destination,” “Photos,” and “Packing,” with “Destination” reaching further to “Sea” — the associations fanning out.

Don’t organize — just get it out

The rules are loose. Just three:

• Place them in the order they come — never mind the arrangement or whether they’re any good
• Don’t criticize — even if you think “this might not be related,” put it down for now
• Don’t stop your hand — when nothing comes, go back a card or two and head a different way

The important thing is not to try to organize. You don’t need to build a tidy tree like a mind map. As long as there’s some connection between two neighboring cards, A and B, that’s enough. The diagram as a whole doesn’t have to hold together.

It’s similar to freewriting, but there you keep writing sentences without stopping. Word association is single words, and because each card stands on its own, you only have to watch the “A to B” link — which makes it easier to keep going.

What changes when you repeat it

Noticing a problem, hitting on a cause, having a solution come to you — in the end, all of this is the work of opening drawers of memory and experience inside yourself. You can’t think of something you know nothing about. An “idea” is something you once saw, heard, or did, surfacing again in a different shape.

Most of the time those drawers stay shut. Word association is repeated practice at opening them. The more rounds you do, the more readily words come, and the further back into memory you can reach.

How many drawers can you open from a single word?

How to do it in ThinkTray

Put one card in the middle and write the word you’ll start from.

With that card selected, press Alt+↑ Alt+↓ Alt+← Alt+→ (Mac: ⌥↑ and so on). A new card with an arrow appears in the direction you pressed, ready to type into. Write a word, then Alt+arrow again. Keep tapping as fast as words come and the cards spread out in a chain. The card you just made stays selected, so you can keep linking one after another.

• To go back down a branch — Ctrl+↑ Ctrl+↓ Ctrl+← Ctrl+→ (Mac: ⌃↑ and so on) jumps to the nearest card in that direction. Go back to an earlier card, then grow a new branch with Alt+arrow in another direction
• When a card gets cramped — Shift+F2 (Mac: Shift+Enter) resizes the card to fit its contents
• Ignore the layout — just get it all out. You can drag the cards around freely later

Tips for keeping it up as practice

• Don’t expect a payoff from one session — like a warm-up, the value is in repetition. Five minutes is fine; what matters is doing it often
• Welcome the far words — a leap that makes you wonder “where did that come from?” is a sign you’ve reached deeper into the drawers than the obvious word right next door
• Don’t try to keep it neat — arrows can cross and branches can be all different lengths
• A catch is a bonus — if a word that comes up touches something on your mind right now, feel free to carry it into Recognize the Problem or into writing it out in a text file. But the real aim is getting used to putting things out