31/5/2018

​Every writer is tempted to try writing in a stream of consciousness. At least once. Sometimes it seems like a good idea, particularly if you are stumped and have absolutely no clue what to write at that moment. But then, how many writers are Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, or Marcel Proust? Or, Bob Dylan singing about his dream on “ The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan?
Recording your thoughts is one thing, what comes out of it is yet another. The problem here does not lie in the manner you thoughts will read like, whether they will make sense to anybody, including yourself, or whether your sentences will be grammatically correct. It is, in what the early cybernetics researchers used to call ‘the black box effect’ — you might know what is coming in, but you cannot be certain what is going to come out.
The stream of consciousness is complicated in its simplicity — it is revealing. It leaves no places to hide your thoughts and feelings, it is, first of all, revealing about the writer himself. It is often a process where a writer turns himself into his own therapist. Thoughts come out as if they have their own free will, with no respect or excuses. No hiding.
For some, that could be quite a frightening process. You may fashion and modify, those thoughts when they have been written down, but then, is that the true stream of your thoughts? Sure, you can fashion and modify the text, it can seem and read like the stream of consciousness, but is that really it or is it something you think it should be?
Not everybody is willing or courageous enough to practically bare it all, you leave yourself completely open to a judgment of anybody and everybody who is reading your thoughts. But then the key question you need to answer is whether you really want to judge yourself. Writing down whatever comes to your mind is simple, what comes out can be very complicated.
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