By the question, I mean... do you spend time just writing down the first thing that comes to mind? A twinkling of an idea with no obvious way of turning it into a story that, for a while, you just go with the flow with. Writing it down, to the point at which you can't go any further. Then stopping. All you have are a few sentences, maybe paragraphs, but without any obvious use. I do. I have hundreds of such pieces. Maybe, one day, i'll give them a read-through and decide whether to keep them; whether any could form the basis or the continuation of a story. But, as of this moment, I just keep them in a pile of incomplete thoughts.
Not entire paragraphs, but I do write down sentences that I think a character would say. Sentences that may or may not end up being used. That and names, concepts, ideas, etc. I should probably create a Wikipedia for my universe.
I do freewrites, but usually they're set in one of my story worlds and for some specific purpose or other. Maybe I'm trying to get a better feel for the personalities of two characters and how they would interact (clash), so I'll try the old exercise of writing them as children on the playground, or if they're young characters I might write them as adults. Another uselful exercise I sometimes do is to write a scene you're struggling with from a different character's POV, to understand how they would see the same events. This can be very helpful. Ok, let me correct that. Often the first few lines of a freewrite are basically automatic writing, just some meaningless gibberish or something with very little meaning, just to loosen up and open up creativity. Some pretty wild surreal stuff. Then I might sort of move by stages toward it being about certain characters in a situation. But by the time I hit the bottom of the first page there's a goal and a specific setup going. In fact (more related to what you're asking about) when I walk and think about my stories, I often find myself thinking very non-specifically at first, just sort of daydreaming about anything or nothing. Just letting the mind drift aimlessly, and often I notice it likes to go over the same old ground very unproductively when you do that. So I sort of shake myself (metaphorically) and decide on what I want to think about. I'll actually mentally say the words "Ok, what am I going to think about now? I don't want to waste this time on nonsense."
Sure, all the time now, and I wish I'd started many years earlier. I have extensive notes for story ideas, and like you say, often just a few sentences outlining a plot, or even an interesting setting/universe that a story might take place in. Some technological innovations that might fit into a future science fiction story. An interesting character, or even a cool character name. All kinds of things like that. Some I use a few weeks or months later, and most I've never used - yet. I scroll through every few months to remind myself of some of these ideas, and sometimes they fit into a contest prompt, or into a newer story idea that'd come to me. I support your doing the same, it's a really useful thing for writers to do, in my view.
Sometimes this is the way someone writes. Sometimes things don't need to "make sense" or fit into an intelligible narrative- the beauty and freedom of thought can be its own achievement. Automatic writing was famously championed by the surrealists. Benjamin Peret's book of short stories, The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works, came about this way. These stories feel a bit like the literary equivalent of Terry Gilliam's collage-animations for Monty Python. Anyway here's Peret's own guidance on the art of automatic writing: "Take a hand, paper, ink, and a pen with a new nib, and settle yourself comfortably at your table. Now forget all your worries, forget that you are married, that your child has whooping-cough, that you are Catholic, that you are a senator, that you are a disciple of Auguste Comte or of Schopenhauer, forget antiquity, the literature of all countries at all times. You no longer want to know what is logical and what is not, you no longer want to know anything except what you are going to be told. Write as fast as possible so as not to lose any of the secrets that are made known to you about yourself, and above all do not re-read yourself. You will soon notice that, little by little as you write, the sentences become faster, stronger, more alive. And if, by chance, you find that you stop suddenly, don't hesitate, force the door of the unconscious and write the first letter of the alphabet, for example. The letter A is as good as any other. Ariadne's thread will return by itself. Having said that, I begin. "A bunch of asparagus that is not quite seven leagues long is exhausting itself cutting out a rainbow in a box of shoe polish. The rainbow runs along the beach looking for a pipe made of foam. It hears the sea in the hollow of its hand and becomes, after thirty years of study on an island of shifting sands, a ship's captain. It is then that the king of a commonplace country gives him a soup tureen as a present. He puts some tortoise eggs in it, and when the moon changes the soup tureen flies off like the last sigh of a consumptive. Yet it was a very beautiful night and the stars, after having lost at baccarat, had gone off to fish for trout with cars' headlights..."
Thank you for sharing these paragraphs. Oh, the trouble I've had convincing students to write freely without stopping to reread, reconsider, mark out, and generally edit every thought that comes through their writing brain. People get the idea that each sentence they produce must be polished and edited for public consumption or else they've wasted their time. I rarely reread my stream of consciouness writing. If I had a dollar for every word I've written as practice, I'd have a lot of dollars.
Hi, Not completely stream of consciousness, but I am a pantster which means when I start a new novel that's how I begin. I imagine a scene or a character etc and then I start writing. Then after maybe a few pages, I start to broaden things out and those snippets become chapters and a story. Cheers, Greg.
Write aimlessly? Is there any other way to do it? I do everything you're doing only I don't stop. I push myself to keep going. I mean, that's what you have to do if you want them to be stories.
