Freewriting

I have never had enough patience for "stream of consciousness" novels, which dominated the literary scene a century ago thanks to such writers as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William Faulkner. Whatever goes through the writer's mind goes down on the page, or so it seems. Periods and other punctuation are optional. A single sentence can go on for pages.

This kind of writing came on the scene on the heels of impressionist art, which led to even more abstract art. I credit — or blame — the invention of photography for this. Previously artists were judged on their ability to accurately reflect reality. When you hired a painter to produce a portrait of your daughter, you wanted it to look like your daughter. You didn't want to see her with three eyes. And you wanted a bowl of fruit to look like a bowl of fruit.

Photography threatened to put portrait painters and other artists out of work. Art was saved by the impressionists, whose art showed not reality but the artists' impression of reality. And if painters and sculptors could do this and get away with it, why not novelists and poets? And so stories no longer had to follow a straight narrative, and poetry no longer had to rhyme. Poets like E.E. Cummings created verse that seemed to make no sense at all.

Peter Elbow

All this is a roundabout way of introducing the subject of freewriting, described by Peter Elbow in his book Writing with Power and underscored by Roy Peter Clark in his book Murder Your Darlings. Elbow explains, "To do a freewriting exercise, simply force yourself to write without stopping for ten minutes."

It doesn't matter what you write about or whether it even makes sense. In effect, you produce a stream of consciousness. This is not intended for publication, however. It is simply an exercise. You write in a random way just to see what happens, sort of in the way you might wander around aimlessly at a county fair or an art museum. Maybe you will discover something interesting. Maybe not. "The only point is to keep writing," Elbow says.

Clark says he sometimes tries this when traveling by plane. He has a general topic in mind, then just scribbles in a notebook anything he can think of that relates to that topic. Sometimes these random ideas can take shape into something worthwhile.

The closest I have come to this in my writing comes when I am uncertain about what to say on a certain subject. When in doubt, I just start writing. It will be terrible, guaranteed. Yet it eventually may begin to make sense to me, and I can go back to the beginning and start over. 

Stream of consciousness writers, however, leave it to their readers to make sense of it all. I've just never had that much patience.