Things I used to forget before I had a place to write them down...etc.

From Et cetera

Stream of consciousness is a loosely defined form of writing, very much akin to the real-time nature of live debate. Pieces of writing that qualify as stream-of-consciousness works are not mutually exclusive with other forms of writing. You could write an entire newspaper, novel, editorial, flyer advertisement or scribbled note on a napkin and they may all qualify as stream of consciousness, so long as the writer in question has done no prior preparatory work in order to produce the final piece.

The difference between the kind of thinking it requires to participate in a live debate, which forces you to think on your feet, and to write in stream of consciousness is minimal, but with writing, you are afforded the opportunity to edit your work and prepare its presentation. Usually, stream of consciousness writing is both started and completed in a single sitting (not counting polished edits over time, but as we all know, there are exceptions to every rule.

Defining Stream of Consciousness Writing

Examples

Take, for instance, a fan fiction story. A well-written fan fiction story is almost always accompanied by a substantial amount of research into the fictional universe in which the writer has chosen to play. If you scrutitinize what you write (as most who deserve to be called writers likely do), it would be impossible to write a proper Star Trek story without making notes about the U.S.S. Enterprise, its cabins, the layout of the main deck and which characters were responsible for what operational aspects of the spaceship.* In the same respect, you can't recreate a fictional scene on the Titanic as it sinks without knowing which end tipped first. If you happened to know this already, the stream of consciousness is valid, but with historical fiction and fan fiction in particular, there are often enough unaccounted-for variables that some element of research is almost essential in most cases.

Non-stream-of-consciousness writings I know of...

Oddly, it is extremely difficult to identify stream-of-consciousness writing just by reading it, whereas it is equally and oppositely simple to decipher when a piece of writing has definite research and "pre-writing" behind it. Stream of consciousness can contain ambiguous references to items that may have been researched or may have been a fragment of the writer's base knowledge. There's really no way of telling whether or not the information is coming off the top of his head or from an external source.

On the other hand, there are non-stream-of-consciousness writings wherein it is blisteringly obvious that a considerable amount of research went into the preparation and planning of the piece prior to the author sitting down to scrawl it out. Some examples include:

• 300, graphic novel by Frank Miller
• The Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln's most famous speech
• Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn, as well as its sequels and pretty much any published Star Wars novel.

* This should be taken lightly, of course, because I did just say that you could write an entire novel in stream of consciousness. To match my rather cruel standards as to what qualifies as legitimate fan fiction, though, it demands that your consciousness (that is to say, your memory) contains substantial Enterprise-based knowledge. For many Star Trek fans (and, indeed, any rabid fan of some string of pop culture phenomena), this is not out of the ordinary.

Stream-of-consciousness writings I know of

As I said, it's impossible to identify a stream of conscious piece just by reading it, unless you have written it yourself or happened to know the circumstances under which it was written. So, I can't really offer a whole whack of examples, but I can tell you this: most of Et cetera is stream of consciousness writing, in particular the entries. Because I know my own writing, I am able to tell by reading the entries which ones required research and what came purely off the top of my head. Curiously, what might be the least likely entry to be a stream-of-consciousness piece, The Infinite Universe Theory, was all written off the top of my head with no research whatsoever. (Those savvy with other existential theories will no doubt be able to see right-through the gaping holes in my stream-of-consciousness theory.

All that said, I can cite a few external works that I suspect are at least based in stream of consciousness writing, such as:

• On Old Age, a BC-era essay by Cicero
• Concerning Specific Forms of Masturbation, a 1922 essay by Wilhelm Reich

Back to that Titanic again...

As an interesting sidenote, I cited historical fiction as being one of the least likely places to find stream of consciousness writing, and I think it goes without saying that history, in and of itself, is one of the primary exports of preliminary research and industrious analyses of facts beyond the author's own immediate knowledge. However, in accordance with the exceptions to every rule rule, I feel I must cite two distinctly different Titanic-related works:

• The first is obvious: Titanic, the popular 1997 James Cameron screenplay that stole all the Oscars alongside its rather more exhilarating motion picture counterpart. The story was plainly historical fiction and a great deal of media attention and production dollars went into reproducing a thorough historically accurate setting in which the fictional plot could take place. Cameron went so far as to arrange a dive to the actual shipwreck and even managed to convince the original ship's builders to release blueprints that were thought lost. They built the ship to full scale, filmed the movie, sunk the rebuilt ship in a 17 million gallon tank and sold the pieces for scrap metal. Intense historical fiction and intensely not stream of consciousness writing.
• Then there's a book called The Loss of the SS Titanic which breaches stream of consciousness logic in two important ways: firstly, it is non-fiction; secondly, it is definitely stream of consciousness writing. The book is written by Lawrence Beesley, a Titanic survivor, and it was published only weeks after the sinking. It recalls a frightfully human rendition of the tale and was clearly written without prior research or anything of the sort when you consider that the sunken liner wasn't discovered for decades after.

See also

• Entries

References