I will be the first to admit that I don’t plan many things in my life, regardless of importance or priority. I find a life that is too planned out to be suffocating, and enjoy the uncertainty that comes with every action. As Socrates once said, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” But i digress. The point is, I don’t find joy in knowing exactly what is going to happen next in my day, as per my own expectations.
For example, this morning, I happened to wake up earlier than usual, greeting the day at a shocking 10am. As with most mornings, I felt an unbelievable surge of motivation to do stuff. What stuff? Stuff that I could finish. The agenda was simple: go to the gym, write, eat, watch tv, and make fun of listings on Craigslist. (But seriously, which one of these people is actually looking for a strictly platonic relationship?)
Now, on any other day, I would’ve completed maybe two of those activities in a timely manner. Today? Well, the issue was I planned to write the next part of “nobody.” That didn’t happen. Which is precisely why I’m writing this instead.
You see, because I write so sporadically, it just makes sense for me to write only when I feel like it—when I feel that burst of inspiration that just prevents my fingers from stopping whatever spree I’ve gotten on. I have ideas for the next part, but part of me is preventing myself from writing them down because it just doesn’t feel right.
So what is “stream of consciousness”, and what does it have to do with my writing? You can probably find a better, more logical definition of it literally anywhere else (because Wikipedia actually screens edits made to pages now), but I would sum it up like this: stream of consciousness is basically the literary form of ranting. I say this from my experience doing so because, the way I see it, you start with an idea (sometimes a really awesome phrase or sentence), and soon realize that unless you write more, that idea will look pretty stupid just chilling there in the middle of your page, with nothing to back it up. So you write. I am more than willing to admit that more than half of the words on this blog are only here because I had a really cool sentence in my head that I wanted to say, but had no contextual reason to say it. That’s when I write posts like these, that have a passable topic and whatnot.
I really enjoy writing stream of consciousness strictly for one reason above all else: I don’t know what’s going to happen next, either. Now, I suppose this example would work better with a higher viewership, but it goes without saying that when reading something, readers will want to know what’s going to happen next, regardless of literary quality. My example would be the Harry Potter series. Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate it’s cultural value and the impact it has made on multiple forms of media, but I simply did not enjoy the series. Still, I found an incessant need to know what happened next, even though I really didn’t care for the characters themselves.
In the context of “nobody.”, because I am writing it piece by piece and releasing it as I finish, the reader essentially has just as much information as I do about characters and how they’re developing. In fact, the reason why I started this was to also to try to include viewer feedback into the development of the story. Although I know the ending, I don’t know the middle, which veritably makes this a very difficult project. And that’s why it’s enjoyable. Again, this would work better with more viewers, but that’s my fault for not knowing SEO techniques and other advertising skills. But I digress… again.
Ultimately, I find writing in a stream of consciousness to be extremely freeing in the sense that every sentence, every paragraph, even every word is the culmination of everything in that single moment when I am writing it. Words can change in a split second if I can think of one better, or they can just not make any sense because I just didn’t know the correct terminology. One of the most exciting things to happen is to be writing and writing, not really knowing where you were going with things, but then suddenly, your mind subconsciously brings back something you wrote at the beginning and relates it to what you are writing in that single moment. And suddenly, BAM, you’ve gone full circle. I think the human mind is much more powerful in the oddest ways than we could possibly imagine.
For any aspiring writers, English students, or graduate students working on a thesis, do give it a try: writing without knowing where you’re going with your words (like I said earlier, the literary form of ranting) often gives you a kick of sorts back into “the zone”. In fact, I’ve heard that a good technique to get rid of writer’s block is to just write loads of crap until you come up with a thought.
Stream of consciousness is cool.
Peace.
(And to bring things full circle, I definitely could have written the next part in the same amount of time because this about the same number of words as an average part I release. But it’s too late now, and I don’t like to have regrets. Also, my memory is really bad so I don’t really remember anything past the last 10 minutes anyway.)
The Nobody Project 