Freewriting

Stream of consciousness is a style where you write as if the character is expressing things from their head, it's a little more ambling and more heavily coloured by and representing their thoughts. It is also often done in present tense first-person.
As such @BWriter, it is important that you have a very solid understanding of you're character. Historical context and culture should be incorporated. It's also important to consider you are doing it. Because it's a difficult style.
Some examples of it are Ms Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and The Catcher in the the Rye by J.D Salinger. It is somewhat of a classical post-modernist style, and is quite uncommon as the primary style.

 

It is sort of a vigilante story. The main character is trying to stop his younger sister falling in with the wrong crowd. Only he is mentally ill and no one knows it yet. My first idea is to write the main story in third person but have paragraphs every so often written as stream of consciousness to show the rage building and hint at the illness. I have written an outline but that's it ao far.

 

My advice is to read more works that use stream of consciousness. I find that this is one of those things that's best learned through imitation, but that's just my opinion.

 

Free Indirect Speech was popularized by Flaubert, in XIX century and it was by him firstly used consciously as a technique. Stream of Consciousness seems, to me, to be kind of a XX century modernist evolution of Free Indirect Speech, by whose application in literary prose is James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, etc, all recognized.

So, the question is: towards what is it going? What comes next? What do you think will be the technique of the present century, concerning to high literature...? I know there is David Foster Wallace, but I do not see any great technical innovation in him; anyway. What do you think?

Thanks guys.

 

I think it's important to look at why those authors used those techniques in the first place. There is a lot of external (i.e., non-literary) influence. For example, after the horrors of WWI, many European writers began "looking inward" at a character's thoughts instead of the character's environment. Another example is absurdist literature, which was influenced by nihilism in the late 1800s to early 1900s. In the early 2000s (possibly earlier), there was a rise in popularity of literature written by immigrants. It's hard to tell what exactly will influence the next movement, but we can get a general idea by looking at what's happening around us and which ideas/philosophies are popular.

 

Well, philosophically, we live in the declining of the modernity, Enlightenment and liberal ideas, so that the mass culture and the irrationalism arise; I think, personally, we are in a new middle age. The Great dream of the Enlightenment was killed by the world, that was not, indeed, prepared to a world of reason, but to one of mere happiness, as we were all animals.

 

I'm waiting for the Japanese cell phone novels to take over the world.

 

Oh my..., that is weird; not by the innovation, what it is, indeed, but by neglecting any kind of sophistication, and any originality is under the sophistication. Cell Pfhone novels are written in a fucking poor language, in a way that has nothing to do with art.
However, I think what we use to read as "Letters of [author's name]", in future, will be "Cell Phone Messages of [author's name]"

But, anyway, thanks for the information and for replying.

 

I don't think sophistication has much chance in the future of literature. LitFic is already in decline. There are very few brave authors exploring new territory. And if one shows up they don't create a trend, just a little buzz. With all the new media around us, there are much more ways to express oneself besides words. Visual stuff is the new it.

 

Well, if sophistication is dead, art is dead; not that I disagree with you, but it implies that: originality itself is not art; you can poo in a blank page, that would be fucking original, but not art, not sublime, not "beautiful" (in a aesthetics conception, which means sophisticated).

Sometimes I think it is due the common people's few capacity of comprehension of sophisticated art, exactly the same case as classical music decline in xx century, when composers like Stravinsky, Bartok and Schoenberg left themselves to abandon functional harmony, in order to use a lot of polyphony, politonality and atonality. Ignorant people, and it means, the mass, could not understand a thing, could not appreciate it. It, plus marxism influency and deconstructionism, makes pop art arise, and then, well, there is it now.

Art is not made by itself anymore; it is made to make people enjoy it -- it is focused on emotions, and not in the capacity of creating them (which is different; and not that you cannot enjoy it, but that "make people enjoy it" should not be the main end of art, but the art itself). It implies in make people ignorant about the art itself, about what is to contemplate.

 

I think your first sentence kinda folded into itself, but I think I got some meaning out of it

Art doesn't have to be sophisticated. Understanding art requires a bit of sophistication but art can be rather plain and simple. You can call anything art and make it appear sophisticated if the audience thinks it's more than what it looks like at first glance. Leave your old hat in a museum and it may win the Turner prize. It can be both old hat and art.

The people with smaller capacity for comprehension were always there. The new thing nowadays is the lack of drive to improve. Lacking comprehension is okay, it's not a shameful thing. That makes it much easier to reject something that seems too sophisticated, rather than making an effort to understand it. So we end up with less people trying to get into it.

You need **I'm editing a typo here, it's meant to be "don't need!"**to know of or recognise "ployphony, politonality and atonality" in order to appreciate it. Cows like classical music.

Marxism has nothing to do with "pop art". Technically, the countries who tried to implement it thought pop art was rotten and should be largely discouraged. And the main reason for that had nothing to do with esthetics. It was all about the purpose of art in society.

Next, you're gonna tell me cubists are square

You mean art for art's sake? What's your native language?
There's still that, but there's too much stuff being "created" these days. And it's all divided into groups of interest which are all considered equal. It's more difficult to put one thing in front of the others and say okay, this is now the new shiny.

 

Well, sophistication does not mean complexity; actually, simplicity, to be achieved, requires a lot of sophistication; see Hemingway.

Well, I think we both are discussing this by different backgrounds. For example, to me, philosophically, by the definition of contemplation, cows cannot contemplate any kind of art, because contemplation requires necessarily reason.

Yes
Sorry. It is Portuguese.

 

I have a different philosophical conception of aesthetics, which would take a long time to explain here and has nothing to do with what I am proposing here hahah

 

I edited above, it was a typo. You don't need to recognise the technical part of art in order to enjoy it. Music is different from literature since we don't need a medium to enjoy music, but we do need one ( language ) in order to enjoy literature. Understanding something brings more joy. Contemplation involves some sort of understanding or at least an attempt to understand. I don't think we need to contemplate music as it often can interact with our subconscious levels. Language is always conscious.
Hemingway is not simple, as often bandied around writing forums, he's profound . He's "simple" as the opposite of "ornate", not as the opposite of "complex". And sophistication=higher degree of complexity.

This started to look like math equasions What are we talking about again?

Do go on. Everybody else seems to be so mesmerized by this little conversation they are speechless Or, your initial question has no answer, there is nothing remarkable expected in the future development of literature. (I got some stuff to do tomorrow, though, I'm not abandoning the ship )

 

Subconscious is part of psychoanalyses, which is a mind theory and pseudoscience :v

Well, yes; but I avoid to say complexity because it seems, at least to me, something that could not be possibly comprehended, and that is not art at all. But, anyway, we both agree that Hemingway had a lot of work to achieve his simplicity: that work is what I call sophistication.

 

I could explain my aesthetics theory,-- it is a lot influenced by Kant views of moral (I reject his aesthetics conception, though, ironically haha), by phenomenology and by Kant's epistemology --, but that'd be better as a conversation, not a huge a text.

 

Anyone do this. Natalie Goldberg talks about this idea in Writing Down the Bones. A timed exercise of 3o minutes, free writing, or in other words, stream of consciousness writing. No editing, no thinking, just putting down words. Other people have promoted the same idea, Julia Cameron in The Artists Way (I think) talks about Morning Pages. Rather than Goldberg's timed practice, it's three pages (or somesuch) of handwritten non stop stream of consciousness. Anyone do this?

 

No but I kind of want to now. I do this for about 30 seconds every time I get a new pen or ink or notebook.

 

I do it most days. Some days, or in the olden days I might do-did the straight stream of consciousness play fiddle.

These days I normally go for the diary entry-twisted, and stick it on the blog, take it down three minutes afterward, noting the missing articles that require a proper day's work to insert and remove again. And anyway if the boss read my story I'd be sacked for sucking his dog's tail in fiction, or whatever it was/was not...

 

You shall always be my @Morrissey [swoon/fever]

 

I think it's a bit like doing a brain poop?

I got a story fragment out of my morning scribbling today. It was the diary of a new university student called Claire, who is lodging in the attic room of a big old 1920's building in a posh street in a city. She has acne, braces and long braids and is formerly from an all girls school.

She was looking out of her attic window at the lady next door, who is in her thirties, has red hair and likes to paint in the nude in her garden while playing loud classical music (in this instance Gustav Mahler's music used in the film Death in Venice) on a portable CD player and smoking cigarettes with a long cigarette holder - like a movie star. The neighbour lady's name is Catherine, so Claire dubs her 'Catherine the Great'.

That's where I got too. Oh and Claire also has a pet spider in the beams that she likes to watch catching and mummifying its prey. She's also adopted a bony old stray cat she calls puss.

 

Apparently I want to do this, because I keep trying it, but I keep finding it annoying and I stop.

 

We had to do 25 minutes of daily freewriting in a journal for English class when I was 13. I've never looked for a cite because the teacher read us an article about a study, but the theory is that it takes 20 minutes of continuous handwriting for your brain to fully activate the part that controls writing. So, you tack on 5-10 more minutes to cover the initial stops and starts and the tapping of the pen on the notebook when you can't think of what to write about at first.

The resulting writing isn't supposed to be "good". When we had to do it for English class, we were supposed to keep writing, even if we had to write "I can't think of what to write" over and over again until something came to us, which it usually did, a couple of sentences later. That's why journal entries, as opposed to fiction, work really well for freewriting.