creative writing stream of consciousness

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What is Stream of Consciousness Writing — Methods & Tips

A s a writer, stream of consciousness may be fun to write but unenjoyable to read. Or for you, the reverse may be true. When talking about screenwriting, stream of consciousness may not be a method frequently used on the page but can be used and benefited from in the pre-writing process or even with visual elements on screen. This article will answer what is stream of consciousness writing by providing narrative examples and film examples, while also demonstrating another use of the method to help screenwriters (or any writer) connect to their best work. 

Defining Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness definition.

So, what exactly do we mean by stream of consciousness? Well, if we can get a little "heady" on you, let's break it down. Try to think of your brain activity as constantly moving forward, like a car on a road or, hey, an actual stream!

But for this analogy, let's stick with the car.

When we sit down to write, especially any sort of narrative , there is a lot of "starting" and "stopping." We think of one line and we write it down (the car goes forward) but then we stop to think about what the next line should be (the car stops). Therefore, a typical way to write is like mental rush-hour traffic, where the flow of ideas are constantly interrupted, considered, planned, etc.

Stream of consciousness writing is a wide-open highway where your mental car can drive at full speed with nothing to block or detour ideas.

Now, hopefully that analogy made sense but just in case it didn't, here's a more formal stream of consciousness definition.

Stream of Consciousness Definition

What is stream of consciousness writing.

Stream of consciousness writing is a method of writing that captures the myriad of thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind. This method’s purpose is to allow these thoughts to pass through without any inhibitors. It’s quite literally capturing the “stream” of your consciousness.

The term actually originated in psychology before the literary world ever got a hold of it. It was coined in 1855 by Alexander Bain in the first edition of “The Senses and the Intellect.” William James in 1890 used it in “The Principles of Psychology.” But the first person to apply it to a literary text was May Sinclair, discussing Dorothy Richardson’s use of the term in her novel, “Pointed Roofs” in 1915.  

This is different from an internal monologue. Internal monologue relays thoughts in a linear and logical way. Stream of consciousness can be marked often by non-linear and unusual grammatical or syntax structures, for it represents the more natural flow of thought. This is why the nature of this is often long-winded writing. 

Stream of consciousness vs internal monologue

• Internal monologue is logical and often linear. Thoughts coherently move from one to the next.  
• Stream of consciousness writing is often non-linear, characterized by nontraditional grammar and syntax.

Now that we know the basics of stream of consciousness, let's look at some quick examples to make sure we understand the concept. Here's Senior Lecturer Elizabeth Delf from Oregon State University on what this writing style looks like on the page and how it shapes the storytelling.

Stream of Consciousness Writing Example

Let's move on to discuss more of the benefits of stream of consciousness writing and look at some more examples from literature and film in detail.

Why is This Important?

Benefits of stream of consciousness writing.

Because of its cerebral nature, stream of consciousness writing is great for writing about consciousness or as different consciousnesses. What does that mean? It lets the writer explore and write to a truer experience, one that is more reflective of what’s happening inside the mind. This kind of practice would be good for writing about a drug experience, a hallucination, or even describing a dream world or some other trance-like state. 

The reason it’s used in narratives and films alike, is to make the viewer or the reader truly experience those thoughts as the character is thinking them. It doesn’t just relay thoughts to the audience for informational purposes, but creates an experience of thinking.

Stream of consciousness writing isn’t just for the narrative. It is also a brainstorming technique to encourage creativity and intuitive writing. This can be especially helpful for writer’s block. 

Stream of Consciousness Examples

Use stream of consciousness in movies.

In film, stream of consciousness isn’t always used as a writing technique, but instead may express itself in the visual elements on screen. 

Let’s consider David Lynch .

Lynch comes to mind as the majority of his films could be considered a kind of stream of consciousness. Let’s look at one in particular... Inland Empire . 

Laura Dern’s character, Nikki, is an actress who gets lost in her new role. Her real self and the character she’s playing start to blend into one. Aside from the distorted cinematography, the film focuses on the subjectivity of Nikki’s experiences. It goes from one hallucination to the next that feels more like an association than logical plot structure.

Whether you enjoyed this nightmarish drama or not, it’s a true experience of stream of consciousness using visual elements, auditory elements, and scene by scene surrealism as a way to show the character’s perception. The audience experiences the messiness that is her mind. 

You could understand this without ever hearing David Lynch explain the film. But even more fascinating is how the filmmaker’s stream of consciousness helped create the film. 

Caption: Lynch’s stream of consciousness process

In the video above, he talks about his usual process — how when he gets an idea, he writes it down little-by-little, and eventually, it turns into a script. With Inland Empire , he explains his process as writing an idea down, then going right out to shoot it. Getting another idea, and then going to shoot it. He states he didn’t have a clue of how one idea was related to the other. 

In this case, his entire filmmaking process for this film could be considered stream of consciousness! Which, because we’re talking about David Lynch, may not actually come as a surprise to most of us, but perhaps gives more clarity to how and why the movie unfolded the way it did. 

Stream of consciousness writing examples in a screenplay

And of course, screenplays can have stream of consciousness in their dialogue or voiceover, but it’s not as common. It’s not as common because most of the time when a character is going on some tangent, it’s considered an inner monologue . Keep in mind, an internal monologue is different than stream because it follows a coherent path — often linear, going from one thought to the next, even if it appears as rambling.

And these monologues are in a ton of scripts. 

But that being said, there are examples in cinema that do use stream of consciousness in the actual script. 

The voiceovers in The Big Lebowski border on stream of consciousness. Often going from one thought to the next with unconventional grammar, syntax and heavy use of association. To be fair, the associations are fairly logical in instances but this is interspersed with dream sequences that are absolutely stream of consciousness. 

Stream of Consciousness Example in The Big Lebowski  •   Read Full Scene

But before the movies, this technique was used as a way to describe and dissect literature in the early 20th century. 

Using stream of consciousness in fiction

Stream of consciousness is most common in fiction. Novels are longer winded mediums than anything else and this kind of writing can be used to not only reveal thoughts of a character but reveal the inner workings of their mind. 

The first time this psychological term was used in a literary sense was by May Sinclaire in 1915, when she was reviewing Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs . 

“On one side was the little grey river, on the other long wet grass repelling and depressing. Not far ahead was the roadway which led, she supposed to the farm where they were to drink new milk. She would have to walk with someone when they came to the road, and talk. She wondered whether this early morning walk would come, now, every day. Her heart sank at the thought.”

Virginia Woolf uses stream of consciousness throughout the iconic Mrs. Dalloway :

“Her only gift was knowing people almost by in-stinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the house with the china cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally Seton-such hosts of people; and dancing all night; and the waggons plodding past to market; and driving home across the Park. She remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walk-ing towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must in-evitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?”

Woolf takes us through this paragraph of past people and places, through means of nostalgic associations.

Brainstorming Tips for Screenwriters

Stream of consciousness brainstorming.

In screenwriting, stream of consciousness writing doesn’t happen on the page per se. While it can be voiceover or dialogue, generally speaking, you won’t want to go on tangents in the confines of a visual medium. 

But that being said, the most powerful brainstorming tool for a screenwriter, or really for any writer, is stream of consciousness pre-writing.

Because stream of consciousness writing is often long-winded, lacking structure, it may seem unorganized. But there is still organization there. 

Stream of consciousness is the result of the way your brain is naturally ordering its thoughts, feelings, and all of the energy in between. This is powerful. Trust it. Deeper patterns appear.

Ones that are harder to access when you’re obsessively thinking about plot, theme, and character. This is what people refer to as flow state. Use it!

Let’s write!

With stream of consciousness brainstorm writing, we don’t stop or hesitate. We just write without objectively thinking about what to put on the page. 

So rather than just free writing, here are some stream of consciousness writing exercises you can try to help discover more about your characters. 

Set a timer and just go for it.

• You can start with how you’re feeling or if you’re thinking of a character you started creating...what if they felt this way?
• You’re at a party — what’s going on, who do you run into, who do you avoid?
• Imagine your character is on a sailboat with 10 plus people. They suddenly recognize someone on the boat. Who is it?

Keep in mind, these just become regular writing prompts  if you think too much about them. The goal here is to get into the flow of your natural thoughts, free of all ideas about those thoughts. 

Don’t hesitate and just keep writing until that timer goes off!

Creative Writing Prompts

If you’re feeling up for it and want to practice more stream of consciousness, give the next post a try. We’ve provided over 80 prompts, that will help get you into that flow state!

Up Next: Writing Prompts →

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• Stream of Consciousness

Stream of Consciousness Definition

What is stream of consciousness? Here’s a quick and simple definition:

Stream of consciousness is a style or technique of writing that tries to capture the natural flow of a character's extended thought process, often by incorporating sensory impressions, incomplete ideas, unusual syntax, and rough grammar.

Some additional key details about stream of consciousness:

• Stream of consciousness writing is associated with the early 20th-century Modernist movement.
• The term “stream of consciousness” originated in psychology before literary critics began using it to describe a narrative style that depicts how people think.
• Stream of consciousness is used primarily in fiction and poetry, but the term has also been used to describe plays and films that attempt to visually represent a character's thoughts.

Understanding Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness writing allows readers to “listen in” on a character's thoughts. The technique often involves the use of language in unconventional ways in an attempt to replicate the complicated pathways that thoughts take as they unfold and move through the mind. In short, it's the use of language to mimic the "streaming" nature of "conscious" thought (thus "stream of consciousness"). Stream of consciousness can be written in the first person as well as the third person .

What Makes Stream of Consciousness Different?

Traditional prose writing is highly linear—one thing or idea follows after another in a more or less logical sequence, as in a line. Stream of consciousness is often  non-linear in a few key ways that define the style: it makes use of unusual syntax and grammar, associative leaps, repetition, and plot structure.

• For instance, in Death in Venice , Thomas Mann uses subtly irregular syntax and grammar to help convey his main character's gradual descent into madness as part of a stream of consciousness passage that begins: "For beauty, Phaedrus, take note! beauty alone is godlike and visible at the same time."
• Additionally, writers of stream of consciousness often use punctuation in unconventional ways (using italics, ellipses, dashes, and line breaks to indicate pauses and shifts in the character's train of thought).
• As an example, characters' thoughts are often presented to the reader in response to sensory impressions—fragmented observations describing what the character sees, hears, smells, feels, tastes, and so on.
• For example, if a character's mind is constantly returning to the scent of a woman's perfume, the reader might conclude that the character is fascinated by or attracted to that woman.
• Some writers shift rapidly between the perspectives of different characters, allowing readers to experience the “stream of consciousness” of multiple people. For example, in one chapter of his novel  Sometimes A Great Notion , Ken Kesey alternates between the thoughts, emotions, and impressions of several characters (including a dog), using italics and different styles of punctuation to indicate which character is thinking each word, phrase, or sentence.
• Some writers may also choose to arrange events out of chronological order, or to give readers details about the past through a character’s memories. In The Sound and the Fury , William Faulkner conveys many important events and details through memories that arise as part of his different characters’ streams of consciousness.

Stream of Consciousness in Literary History

The term “stream of consciousness” originated in the 19th century, when psychologists coined the term to describe the constant flow of subjective thoughts, feelings, memories, and observations that all people experience. Beginning in the early 20th century, however, literary critics began to use “stream of consciousness” to describe a narrative technique pioneered by writers like Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Many of these writers were interested in psychology and the "psychological novel," in which writers spend at least as much time describing the characters’ thoughts, ideas, and internal development as they do describing the action of the plot.

Stream of Consciousness vs. Interior Monologue 

Both interior monologue and stream of consciousness involve the presentation of a character's thoughts to the reader. However, there are differences between the two.

• In interior monologue, unlike in stream of consciousness, the character's thoughts are often presented using traditional grammar and syntax, and usually have a clear logical progression from one sentence to the next and one idea to the next. Interior monologue relates a character's thoughts as coherent, fully formed sentences, as if the character is talking to him or herself.
• Stream of consciousness, in contrast, seeks to portray the actual experience of thinking, in all its chaos and distraction. Stream of consciousness is not just an attempt to relay a character's thoughts, but to make the reader experience those thoughts in the same way that the character is thinking them.   

Stream of Consciousness Examples

Stream of consciousness became widespread as a literary technique during the Modernist movement that flourished in the years just before and then after World War I (the early to mid 20th century). Even as Modernism gave way to other movements, it remained as a technique, and is still used not infrequently today. 

Stream of Consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf is known for using stream of consciousness in her writing. The novel  Mrs. Dalloway  follows the thoughts, experiences, and memories of several characters on a single day in London. In this passage, the title character, Clarissa Dalloway, watches cars driving by:

She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.

Woolf does more than simply say "Mrs. Dalloway watched the taxis and thought about her life." Rather, she lets the reader into the character's thoughts by using long sentences with semicolons to show the slow drift of ideas and the transitions between thoughts. Readers are able to watch as Mrs. Dalloway's mind moves from observations about things she is seeing to reflections on her general attitude towards life, and then moves on to memories from her childhood, then back to the taxi cabs in the street, and finally to Peter, a former romantic interest. This is an excellent example of using associative leaps and sensory impressions to create a stream of consciousness. Woolf manages to convey not only the content but the structure and process of Mrs. Dalloway's thoughts, a fact which is all the more impressive because she does so while writing in the third person.

Stream of Consciousness in Beloved by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison uses stream of consciousness in passages throughout  Beloved . In this passage, readers hear the voice of a character named Beloved who seems to be the spirit of the murdered infant of another character named Sethe:

I am alone    I want to be the two of us    I want the join    I come out of blue water after the bottoms of my feet swim away from me    I come up    I need to find a place to be    the air is heavy    I am not dead    I am not    there is a house    there is what she whispered to me    I am where she told me    I am not dead    I sit    the sun closes my eyes    when I open them I see the face I lost    Sethe's is the face that left me    Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile    her smiling face is the place for me    it is the face I lost    she is my face smiling at me

Morrison doesn't use proper capitalization or grammar throughout the passage (e.g., "join" is used as a noun). In the place of punctuation, Morrison simply inserts gaps in the text. She also makes use of repetition: when Beloved repeats the words, "I am not dead," she seems to be willing herself to live through a kind of mantra or incantation. Morrison uses run-on sentences and lack of punctuation to show the frantic urgency that Beloved feels when she finds herself alone in death, and to convey her deep desire to be reunited with Sethe—effectively letting readers "listen in" on her thoughts.

Stream of Consciousness in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot

Modernist poet TS Eliot uses stream of consciousness techniques in his famous poem, "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock." 

I grow old ... I grow old ... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

The poem generally follows traditional grammar and syntax, but Eliot moves from idea to idea and sentence to sentence using associative thought. For example, when he thinks of walking on the beach, he is reminded of mermaids. And while it's not immediately clear what peaches and mermaids have to do with old age, the passage shows readers something about how the speaker's mind wanders.

Stream of Consciousness in As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Like Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner is known for his use of stream of consciousness. In this passage from his novel  As I Lay Dying , the character Jewel expresses his frustration that, as his mother is dying, his half-brother is noisily building her a casket just outside her window. 

Because I said If you wouldn't keep on sawing and nailing at it until a man cant sleep even and her hands laying on the quilt like two of them roots dug up and tried to wash and you couldn't get them clean. I can see the fan and Dewey Dell's arm. I said if you'd just let her alone. Sawing and knocking, and keeping the air always moving so fast on her face that when you're tired you cant breathe it, and that goddamn adze going One lick less. One lick less. One lick less until everybody that passes in the road will have to stop and see it and say what a fine carpenter he is. If it had just been me when Cash fell off of that church and if it had just been me when pa laid sick with that load of wood fell on him, it would not be happening with every bastard in the county coming in to stare at her because if there is a God what the hell is He for. It would just be me and her on a high hill and me rolling the rocks down the hill faces and teeth and all by God until she was quiet and not that goddamn adze going One lick less. One lick less and we could be quiet.

The repetition of the phrase "one lick less" helps convey the way Jewel seems to bristle at the repetitive noises made by the saw and the adze outside the window, each noisy "lick" a reminder of his mother's impending death. His sentences also take strange turns and arrive at unexpected places, as when he begins a sentence with a memory of Cash falling off a roof, moves on to lament the constant train of visitors to his mother's room, and ends quite memorably by asking (without the use of a question mark) "because if there is a God what the hell is He for." The passage is incredibly effective at depicting the dizzying range of thoughts and emotions Jewel experiences as he visits the room of his dying mother.

Why Do Writers Use Stream of Consciousness?

Stream of consciousness originated in the late 19th and early 20th century as part of modernist literature. Many of the writers who pioneered the use of stream of consciousness were attempting to create new literary techniques to better represent the human experience—especially in a modern, urban, industrialized world. Today, writers who use stream of consciousness may feel that this technique is more honest or "true to life" than more conventional narrative styles, which force thoughts and ideas into logical and easily digestible sentences.

Writers use stream of consciousness not only to show what a character is thinking, but to actually replicate the experience of thinking, which allows the reader to enter the mind and world of the character more fully. Many people find stream of consciousness writing to be difficult to read, and indeed it does require readers to think in different ways—but this is actually one reason why many writers choose to use the technique. Readers may have to work a bit harder to discern the meaning of a particular sentence, or make inferences about the relationship between seemingly unrelated thoughts in order to fully understand the events of the story, but this is what makes reading stream of consciousness a rich and radically different experience from reading conventional prose.

Other Helpful Stream of Consciousness Resources

• What is the stream of consciousness? Watch this handy video from The School of Life. 
• Who was the first stream of consciousness writer? Many people believe that novelist Dorothy Richardson pioneered this narrative technique.
• Is consciousness really a "stream"? Cognitive scientist Gregory Hickok explores whether the term "stream of consciousness" describes the human thought process accurately. 

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Stream of Consciousness Writing: Ideas, Tips, and Prompts

• May 26, 2023

Home » Day One Blog » Stream of Consciousness Writing: Ideas, Tips, and Prompts

Stream of consciousness writing is a unique journaling technique that invites you to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and allow your thoughts to flow freely, unfiltered by conventional rules or expectations. In the private sanctuary of your journal, you can embrace the spontaneous dance of ideas, memories, and sensations, without worrying about grammar, punctuation, or structure. With this deeply personal form of writing, you become the author and the protagonist, immersing yourself in the world of your own consciousness.

In this post, we’ll explore stream of consciousness writing as a powerful personal approach to journaling. We’ll delve into the unique characteristics of this form of writing and discuss the benefits it holds for self-expression and self-understanding. If you’re seeking a creative outlet, a tool for self-discovery, or a therapeutic practice, this post will provide you with guidance, inspiration, and tips to use stream of consciousness writing in your journaling practice.

What is Stream of Consciousness Writing?

Stream of consciousness writing is personal writing technique when you spontaneously write your thoughts, ideas, and impressions as they come to mind, without any particular order or structure. You simply write your thoughts as they occur, in the same way you think them.

Stream of consciousness writing can be used to explore what’s on your mind at any given moment, express emotion, reflect on past experiences, or generate new ideas. This form of journal writing is not meant to be polished or edited; it’s always a raw and unfiltered representation of one’s thoughts and feelings.

When used as a journaling technique, stream of consciousness writing becomes a tool for self-expression and self-reflection, allowing you to freely write in your journal about what you are thinking, feeling, or experiencing, without censorship or judgment. Stream of consciousness journaling serves as a means of exploring one’s own mind, fostering creativity, and gaining personal insights.

5 Characteristics of Stream of Consciousness Writing

Stream of consciousness writing exhibits several characteristics that facilitate self-expression, self-reflection, and personal growth. Here are some key characteristics of stream of consciousness writing in the context of journaling:

• Free Flow: Stream of consciousness journaling encourages a spontaneous and uninterrupted flow of thoughts. There are no constraints of grammar, punctuation, or structure. The emphasis is on allowing thoughts to emerge naturally and capturing them on paper without judgment or censorship.
• Nonlinear Structure: Unlike traditional journaling, which may follow a chronological or organized structure, stream of consciousness writing embraces a nonlinear approach. Thoughts, memories, and emotions may arise in a seemingly random order, reflecting the fluidity of the mind’s workings.
• Raw and Authentic Expression: Stream of consciousness journaling prioritizes honesty and authenticity. It encourages you to write without filtering your thoughts, emotions, or experiences. The goal is to capture the true essence of one’s inner world, expressing thoughts and feelings as they arise, unedited.
• Spontaneity : Stream of consciousness journaling thrives on the element of spontaneity. It invites you to embrace the unpredictable nature of your thoughts and let them flow freely without premeditation. This means giving yourself permission to write without planning or overthinking, allowing the thoughts to arise spontaneously and capturing them in their raw form.
• Associations and Tangents: Stream of consciousness writing often involves making unexpected associations and following tangents. One thought leads to another, memories resurface, and seemingly unrelated ideas intertwine. This allows for unexpected connections and insights to emerge during the writing process.

These characteristics of stream of consciousness journaling it a useful approach for exploring thoughts, emotions, and experiences with authenticity, depth, and creativity.

Why You Should Try Stream of Consciousness Journaling: 8 Benefits

Incorporating stream of consciousness writing into your journaling offers a unique and liberating approach to self-expression, self-reflection, and personal growth. It encourages you to embrace your authentic voice, explore your thoughts and emotions deeply, and tap into your innate creativity. Through this practice, you can gain valuable insights, experience emotional release, and embark on a transformative journey of self-discovery.

There are several compelling reasons why you should try stream of consciousness writing as a journaling technique:

1. Practice Authenticity & Honesty

Stream of consciousness writing encourages you to express yourself authentically and without inhibitions. It provides a space to explore and communicate your thoughts, emotions, and experiences in their raw and unfiltered form. By bypassing self-censorship, you can tap into your true self and express your innermost thoughts and feelings honestly.

2. Enhance Self-Reflection

Stream of consciousness journaling deepens your self-reflection skills by allowing you to observe your own thoughts and patterns of thinking. It provides an opportunity to gain insights into your beliefs, values, desires, and personal narratives. Through this introspective process, you can develop a greater self-awareness and understanding of yourself.

3. Release Emotions + Catharsis

Writing in a stream of consciousness style can be cathartic and emotionally liberating experience. Journaling about feelings allows you to release pent-up emotions, express your joys and frustrations, and process challenging experiences. The act of uninhibited writing can provide a sense of relief, clarity, and emotional balance.

4. Uncover Subconscious Thoughts

Stream of consciousness writing taps into the realm of your subconscious mind. By letting your thoughts flow freely, you can access hidden or buried thoughts, memories, and associations. This can lead to surprising revelations, creative ideas, and novel perspectives that may not have emerged through structured or controlled writing.

5. Nurture Creativity

Stream of consciousness journaling nurtures your creativity and opens doors to innovative thinking. By embracing a non-linear and spontaneous approach, you can uncover unique connections, generate new ideas, and explore creative solutions to challenges. It offers a fertile ground for your imagination and originality.

6. Support Personal Growth and Self-Discovery

Engaging in stream of consciousness writing as a journaling technique supports your personal growth and self-discovery. It allows you to delve deeper into your own psyche, uncover hidden aspects of yourself, and gain a broader understanding of your identity, values, and aspirations. This process of self-exploration can lead to personal insights, increased self-acceptance, and personal transformation.

7. Reduce Stress and Boost Mindfulness

Stream of consciousness writing can serve as a form of stress relief and a mindfulness practice for you. The act of writing without judgment or preconceived notions helps you become fully present in the moment, focusing on your thoughts and sensations as they arise. It can be a meditative experience that promotes relaxation, reduces stress, and cultivates a state of mindful awareness.

8. Silence Your Inner Critic

Stream of consciousness writing often provides a space to acknowledge—and then silence—your inner critic. When you engage in this uninhibited style of writing, you create a safe space for your thoughts to flow freely, allowing the voice of your inner critic to surface. Your inner critic may express doubts, self-criticisms, or negative beliefs that have held you back. Instead of shying away from these thoughts, view them as opportunities for growth and self-awareness. Using this practice as a way to shed light on the voice of your inner critic, you can better understand its influence, and take steps towards transforming it into a voice of self-empowerment and self-love. Through this process, you can break free from the limitations imposed by your inner critic and cultivate a mindset that supports your growth, creativity, and overall well-being.

10 Tips for Getting Started with Stream of Consciousness Journaling

Getting started with stream of consciousness writing can feel a little daunting at first. The prospect of unleashing a torrent of unfiltered thoughts onto the page may seem overwhelming, especially if you’re accustomed to more structured or controlled writing styles. Just remember that stream of consciousness journaling isn’t about producing a polished piece of literature; it’s about delving into the depths of your mind and capturing the genuine essence of your thoughts and emotions.

Here are a few ways to get started with stream of consciousness writing:

1. Set aside dedicated journaling time.

Allocate a specific time each day or week for your stream of consciousness journaling practice. Create a routine that allows you to focus and immerse yourself in the writing process.

2. Choose a comfortable writing space.

Find a quiet and comfortable space where you can write without distractions. Create an environment that feels conducive to free-flowing thoughts and introspection.

3. Begin with a journal prompt.

Start your stream of consciousness writing session with a simple journal prompt or question. It could be something like “What is on my mind right now?” or “How am I feeling today?” Just remember that the point of stream of consciousness writing isn’t to write in a structured manner, so try answering the initial question as a way to freely explore whatever thoughts come next.

4. Write without judgment.

Embrace a mindset of non-judgment as you write. Let go of the need for perfection or polished writing. Give yourself permission to write freely and without censorship.

5. Keep the pen (or keyboard) moving.

During your writing session, strive to keep your pen (or your fingers on the keyboard) moving. Write continuously without pausing or editing. If you get stuck, write “I don’t know what to write” or repeat words until new thoughts emerge.

6. Embrace the flow.

Allow your thoughts to flow naturally. Don’t worry about coherence, sentence structure, or punctuation. Follow your stream of your consciousness wherever it takes you, even if it seems fragmented or disjointed.

7. Explore sensory details.

Engage your senses in your stream of consciousness journaling. Describe the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures you experience or recall. Engaging with sensory details can deepen your connection to your thoughts and memories.

8. Describe how you’re feeling in the moment.

Express and explore your emotions through stream of consciousness writing. Describe how you feel in the moment, or delve into the reasons behind certain emotions. Use your stream of consciousness writing as a tool for emotional awareness and self-understanding.

9. Experiment with different perspectives.

Try writing from different perspectives, such as writing in the first person as yourself, or even adopting the voice of a fictional character. This can offer fresh insights and new ways of exploring your thoughts and experiences.

10. Reflect on your writing.

After each session, take a few moments to reflect on what you’ve written. Identify any recurring themes, patterns, or insights that arise. Reflecting on your stream of consciousness journaling session can help you gain self-awareness and uncover meaningful revelations.

Ideas for Incorporating Stream of Consciousness Writing Into Other Journaling Techniques

Incorporating stream of consciousness writing into other journaling techniques can add an additional layer of depth and exploration to your practice, offering the benefits of structure and guidance alongside the freedom and spontaneity of stream of consciousness expression.

Here are a few journaling ideas for how to combine stream of consciousness writing with other journaling techniques:

• The Hybrid Approach: Begin your journaling session with a specific prompt or topic, using a structured or guided approach to initiate your writing. Once you have explored that topic or completed the guided exercise, transition into a stream of consciousness writing mode. Allow your thoughts to flow freely without constraints, exploring any tangents or associations that arise from the initial prompt.
• The Stream of Consciousness Warm-Up: Use stream of consciousness writing as a warm-up exercise before transitioning into a more focused journaling technique. Spend a few minutes engaging in free-flowing, unstructured writing to clear your mind, tap into your subconscious, and loosen your creative flow. Once you feel more in the moment, transition into your intended journaling practice with a clearer and more open mindset. For more even more inspiration on using a stream of consciousness warm-up, check out Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages technique.
• Stream of Consciousness Intervals: Within a structured journaling practice, such as gratitude journaling or journaling goals , include intermittent moments of stream of consciousness writing. Set aside specific intervals during your practice where you switch to stream of consciousness mode. This allows you to tap into your spontaneous thoughts, emotions, and insights, adding a layer of authenticity and raw expression to your structured journaling.
• Reflective Stream of Consciousness: After engaging in a structured journaling technique, take a few moments to reflect on what you have written. Then, transition into a stream of consciousness writing session where you explore your reflections, expand upon any lingering thoughts or emotions, and allow yourself to dig deeper into the insights gained from the initial practice. This reflective stream of consciousness writing can provide a more in-depth exploration of your experiences and facilitate a greater understanding of your own thoughts and growth.

20 Stream of Consciousness Journaling Prompts

Using a set of journal prompts can help jumpstart your stream of consciousness writing. Remember, the point of stream of consciousness writing isn’t to write in a structured manner, so try answering the initial question as a way to freely explore whatever thoughts come next. By using prompts as a starting point, you provide yourself with a gentle nudge into the realm of your thoughts and emotions. These prompts act as signposts, guiding your initial focus, but don’t feel confined to sticking strictly to the prompt itself.

Let your mind wander and follow its own meandering path, allowing one thought to naturally lead to another. The beauty of stream of consciousness writing lies in the unexpected connections and insights that emerge as you surrender to the flow of your thoughts. Embrace the spontaneous and uninhibited nature of this writing style, and trust that your words will unveil the depths of your consciousness in their purest form. Embrace these prompts as catalysts, but don’t be afraid to venture beyond them, and let your stream of consciousness writing become a captivating journey of self-discovery and creative expression.

Here are some stream of consciousness journaling prompts to try:

• What is currently on my mind?
• How does my body feel right now?
• What emotions am I’m feeling right now?
• How would I describe where I am sitting right now?
• What’s the first childhood memory that comes to mind?
• What’s the first book, movie, or song that comes to mind right now?
• What do I remember about a recent dream I had?
• What place holds significant meaning to me?
• What’s bothering me right now?
• What am I grateful for in this moment?
• What decision or dilemma am I currently facing?
• What am I longing for right now?
• What fear or insecurity would I like to overcome?
• Who is the first person that comes to mind who has influenced my life in a profound way?
• What quote or saying inspires me?
• What is a favorite hobby or activity that brings me joy?
• What challenge or setback am I facing?
• What is a nature scene or landscape that evokes strong emotions in me?
• What is a cherished object in my life?
• What belief or value shapes my worldview?

Wrapping Up: Exploring Your Inner World with Stream of Consciousness Journaling

By embracing the freedom and spontaneity that stream of consciousness writing offers, you have the power to explore the depths of your mind, unravel the intricacies of your inner world, and tap into the wellspring of your creativity. Allow yourself to surrender to the process, knowing that there are no right or wrong answers, no judgment, and no expectations. The beauty of stream of consciousness writing lies in the raw and authentic expression that emerges from within you. So, let go of any hesitations or self-doubt, and embark on this liberating journey of self-discovery and creative exploration. Happy journaling!

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About the Author

Kristen Webb Wright is the author of three books on journaling. With a passion for writing and self-reflection, Kristen uses her experience with journaling to help others discover the benefits of documenting their thoughts, feelings, and experiences. In her role at Day One, she helps to promote the power of journaling so people from all walks of life can experience the transformative power of journaling.

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Stream of Consciousness Writing

Writing How the Mind Works

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Stream of consciousness is a  narrative technique that gives the impression of a mind at work, jumping from one observation, sensation, or reflection to the next seamlessly and often without conventional  transitions .

Although stream of consciousness is commonly associated with the work of novelists including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, the method has also been used effectively by writers of creative nonfiction  and is often referred to as freewriting.

The metaphor of the stream of consciousness was coined by American philosopher and psychologist William James in "The Principles of Psychology" in 1890 and has been perpetuated to this day in the modern literature and psychology fields.

Urgency and Presence in Stream of Consciousness

Often used by creative writing teachers as a means to get the "creative juices flowing" for their students at the beginning of classes, a stream of consciousness writing exercises often ground writers in the presentness, the importance of a given subject or discourse.

In creative fiction, a stream of consciousness may be used by a narrator to convey the thoughts or feelings going on in the head of a character, a writer's trick to convince the audience of the authenticity of thoughts he or she is attempting to write into the story. These internal monologues of sorts read and transfer thought more organically to the audience, providing a direct look into the "inner workings" of a character's mental landscape.

The characteristic lack of punctuation and transitions only furthers this idea of a free-flowing prose wherein the reader and speaker alike jump from one topic to the next, much like a person would when daydreaming about a given topic—one might start with talking about fantasy films but end up discussing the finer points of medieval costuming, for instance, seamlessly and without transition.

A Notable Example in Tom Wolfe's Nonfiction Work

Stream of consciousness writing isn't only for fictional works—Tom Wolfe's memoir " Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" is packed full of beautiful, eloquent stream of consciousness which provides insight into the protagonists' journey and story. Take this excerpt for example: 

"—Kesey has Cornel Wilde Running Jacket ready hanging on the wall, a jungle-jim corduroy jacket stashed with fishing line, a knife, money, DDT, tablet, ball-points, flashlight, and grass. Has it timed by test runs that he can be out the window, down through a hole in the roof below, down a drain pipe, over a wall and into thickest jungle in 45 seconds—well, only 35 seconds left, but head start is all that’s needed, with the element of surprise. Besides, it's so fascinating to be here in subastral projection with the cool rushing dex, synched into  their  minds and his own, in all its surges and tributaries and convolutions, turning it this way and that and rationalizing the situation for the 100th time in split seconds, such as: If they have that many men already here, the phony telephone men, the cops in the tan car, the cops in the Volkswagen, what are they waiting for? why haven't they crashed right in through the rotten doors of this Rat building--"

In "The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel," Mas'ud Zavarzadeh explains Wolfe's above use of stream of consciousness as the dominating narrative choice for this section of the nonfiction novel, saying "the technical rationale for the use of such narrational devices in the nonfiction novel is the treatment of the subjectivity of the situation or person portrayed, as distinguished from the projected subjectivity (empathy) of the fictive novelist."

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Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness definition.

The literary device stream of consciousness is the continuous flow of thoughts of a person and recorded, thereof, in literature as they occur. In other words, it means to capture a continuous stream of thoughts into words and then scribble them on paper for others to read. This device is used as a noun . The term was first used by a psychologist, William James, in his work published in 1890.

“… it is nothing joined; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ is the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let’s call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life.” –  William James from The Principles of Psychology .

Another appropriate term for this device is “interior monologue ,” where the individual thought processes of a character , associated with his or her actions, are portrayed in the form of a monologue that addresses the character itself. Therefore, it is different from the “ dramatic monologue ” or “ soliloquy ,” where the speaker addresses the audience or the third person.

Difference Between Stream of Consciousness and Free Writing

Stream of consciousness and free writing seems the same. However, the stream of consciousness is a literary activity in which the character is planned, sketched, and then thoughts are scribbled afterward. In freewriting, it is specific, planned, and topic-centered. It is non- fiction as well as a fictional activity. On the other hand, the stream of consciousness in literature writing is character-specific and objective-oriented. Yet, in one way, both are similar in that both need a free mind to write on some topic which in the case of fiction could be a character while in the case of free writing could be a non-fictional essay .

Difference between Traditional Prose and Stream of Consciousness:

• Syntax : Syntax in traditional prose is correct, has an appropriate structure, and is to the point, while it could be choppy, poor, and even wrong in the case of a stream of consciousness.
• Grammar: There is no sense of grammar in the stream of consciousness writing when it is jumbled up or the mind is in a state of flux. However, it is correct, pure, and exact in traditional prose.
• Association: Traditional prose has some association with the general world while the stream of consciousness is removed from reality and is associated with the mind of the character.
• Repetition : Traditional prose is not repetitious unless it is rhetoric , while the writing in a stream of consciousness could be repetitious to the point of annoyance.
• Plot Structure: The plot is structureless in the case of a stream of consciousness, while in the case of traditional prose, it is well organized.

How to Write Stream of Consciousness?

A writer must keep the following points in mind when writing in a stream of consciousness style .

• It must be character-specific.
• It must sync with the character’s world; profession, relations, work, near and dear ones, and even daily activities .
• It must seem to follow the thoughts of that person.
• It must have some links and pieces of evidence of the thought process.
• It must not have a structure, grammar, or any other formal linguistic evidence unless it is recorded for an educational academic.

Examples of Stream of Consciousness in Literature

The stream of consciousness style of writing is marked by the sudden rise of thoughts and lack of punctuation . The use of this narration style is generally associated with the modern novelist and short story writers of the 20th century. Let us analyze a few examples of the stream of consciousness narrative technique in literature:

Example #1 Ulysses by James Joyce

James Joyce successfully employs the narrative mode in his novel Ulysses , which describes a day in the life of a middle-aged Jew, Mr. Leopold Broom, living in Dublin, Ireland. Read the following excerpt:

“He is young Leopold, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then is seen, precious manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old house in Clambrassil to the high school, his book satchel on him bandolier wise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother’s thought.”

These lines reveal the thoughts of Bloom, as he thinks of the younger Bloom. The self-reflection is achieved by the flow of thoughts that takes him back to his past.

Example #2 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

“What a lark! What a plunge! For so it always seemed to me when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which I can hear now , I burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as I then was) solemn, feeling as I did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen …”

Another 20th-century writer that followed James Joyce ’s narrative method was Virginia Woolf.   By voicing her internal feelings, Ms. Woolf gives freedom to the characters to travel back and forth in time. Mrs. Dalloway went out to buy flowers for herself, and on the way her thoughts move through the past and present, giving us an insight into the complex nature of her character.

Example #3 The British Museum Is Falling Down by David Lodge

“It partook, he thought, shifting his weight in the saddle, of metempsychosis, the way his humble life fell into moulds prepared by literature. Or was it, he wondered, picking his nose, the result of closely studying the sentence structure of the English novelists? One had resigned oneself to having no private language any more, but one had clung wistfully to the illusion of a personal property of events. A find and fruitless illusion, it seemed, for here, inevitably came the limousine, with its Very Important Personage, or Personages, dimly visible in the interior. The policeman saluted, and the crowd pressed forward, murmuring ‘Philip’, ‘Tony’, ‘Margaret’, ‘Prince Andrew’.”

We notice the use of this technique in David Lodge’s novel The British Museum Is Falling Down. It is a comic novel that imitates the stream of consciousness narrative techniques of writers like Henry James, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.  We see the imitation of the typical structure of the stream-of-conscious narrative technique of Virginia Woolf. We notice the integration of the outer and inner realities in the passage that is so typical of Virginia Woolf, especially the induction of the reporting clauses “he thought,” and “he wondered,” in the middle of the reported clauses.

Example #4 Notes from The Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I have been going on like that for a long time—twenty years. Now I am forty. I used to be in the government service, but am no longer. I was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in that, at least. (A poor jest , but I will not scratch it out. I wrote it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not scratch it out on purpose!)

This passage can be found at the beginning of the novel. The protagonist of the novel narrates how he has passed more than four decades of his life as it is and has been expelled from the government service. The first-person narration shows his thoughts converted into words. However, the novel was written in Russian and translated into English. Hence, grammar, syntax , and style do not seem to follow the same pattern. However, the monologue occurs in the consciousness of a person.

Example #5  As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

“Well, it isn’t like they cost me anything,” I say. I saved them out and swapped a dozen of them for the sugar and flour. It isn’t like the cakes cost me anything, as Mr Tull himself realises that the eggs I saved were over and beyond what we had engaged to sell, so it was like we had found the eggs or they had been given to us. “She ought to taken those cakes when she same as gave you her word,” Kate says. The Lord can see into the heart. If it is His will that some folks has different ideas of honesty from other folks, it is not my place to question His decree.”

These passages are borrowed from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner . Cora narrates how she has saved something sugar and floor and that Mr. Tull has made her realize that the eggs are now finished. In the next passage, Kate also adds to things that are coming into their stream of consciousness. This stream of consciousness shows, somewhat, sophisticated thoughts with good wording, good grammar, and good sentence structure.

Example #6 On the Road by Jack Kerouac

During the following week, he confided in Chad King that he absolutely had to learn how to write from him; Chad said I was a writer and he should come to me for advice. Meanwhile Dean had gotten a job in a parking lot, had a fight with Marylou in their Hoboken apartment – God knows why they went there – and she was so mad and so down deep vindictive that she reported to the police some false trumped-up hysterical crazy charge, and Dean had to lam from Hoboken. So he had no place to live. He came right out to Paterson, New Jersey, where I was living with my aunt, and one night while I was studying there was a knock on the door, and there was Dean, bowing, shuffling obsequiously in the dark of the hall, and saying, «Hello, you remember me – Dean Moriarty? I’ve come to ask you to show me how to write.

This passage, though, has good punctuation, and good wording gives the impression that Sal Paradise shows his understanding of different things and how his mind moves from Chad to Dean and vice versa with different places and persons coming in quick succession. This shows a beautiful example of the stream of consciousness.

Function of Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness is a style of writing developed by a group of writers at the beginning of the 20th century. It aimed at expressing in words the flow of characters’ thoughts and feelings in their minds. The technique aspires to give readers the impression of being inside the minds of the characters. Therefore, the internal view of the minds of the characters sheds light on the plot and motivation in the novel.

Synonyms of Stream of Consciousness

Stream of Consciousness has no other word or phrase as an exact meaning. However, the following words can be used interchangeably in general meanings such as apostrophe , association of ideas, chain of thought, interior monologue, monologue, aside , or a soliloquy.

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What is Stream of Consciousness? | Definition & Examples

"what is stream of consciousness": a guide for english students and teachers.

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What is Stream of Consciousness? - Transcript (English and Spanish Subtitles Available in Video, Click HERE for Spanish Transcript)

By Liz Delf , Oregon State University Senior Instructor of Literature

12 Nov. 2019

Stream of consciousness is a narrative style that tries to capture a character’s thought process in a realistic way. It’s an interior monologue, but it’s also more than that. Because it’s mimicking the non-linear way our brains work, stream-of-consciousness narration includes a lot of free association, looping repetitions, sensory observations , and strange (or even nonexistent) punctuation and syntax —all of which helps us to better understand a character’s psychological state and worldview. It’s meant to feel like you have dipped into the stream of the character’s consciousness—or like you’re a fly on the wall of their mind.

Authors who use this technique are aiming for emotional and psychological truth: they want to show a snapshot of how the brain actually moves from one place to the next. Thought isn’t linear, these authors point out; we don’t really think in logical, well-organized, or even complete sentences.

For example, on my way to record this video, I didn’t think “Ah, now I am walking to the library. When I get there, I will say good morning to the videographer, and then begin recording. I hope it goes well.”

A more accurate representation might be more like this: “cold / bright / wish I had my sunglasses / walk faster / late again / always late / did I send my script? / should I have practiced more? / oh hi Dylan / which class was he in? / shoe’s untied / ooh colors trees red orange bright / faster / late late late / so bright”

stream_of_consciousness_shoe.jpg

That more realistic, stream-like, associative thought process is what authors are aiming for when they use stream of consciousness narration.

Here’s a literary example from Mrs. Dalloway , by Virginia Woolf:

stream_of_consciousness_woolf.jpg

“For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? Over twenty,--one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.”

This passage is about Clarissa Dalloway’s connection to the city, linking her own heartbeat to the clock’s chimes. But it’s also a good example of stream of consciousness: it has associative thoughts (moving from the clock chimes to her influenza), unusual syntax (all those semi-colons !), and sensory details (like sound, music, and the feeling of a heartbeat).

Virginia Woolf is particularly well known for this narrative technique, along with some other modernist heavy hitters like James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Marcel Proust. Those particular authors were writing in the 1920s and 30s, but stream-of-consciousness isn’t limited to a particular time period or literary movement. It’s unusual, but it has been used by authors like Ken Kesey and Sylvia Plath in the 1960s, as well as Irvine Welsh, George Saunders, and Jonathan Safran Foer in the last decade or so.

Here’s one more example, this one from Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved :

“the air is heavy / I am not dead / I am not / there is a house / there is what she whispered to me / I am where she told me / I am not dead / I sit / the sun closes my eyes / when I open them I see the face I lost / Sethe’s is the face that left me / Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile / her smiling face is the place for me / it is the face I lost / she is my face smiling at me”

stream_of_consciousness_morrison.jpg

This example is even more disjointed than the first, and that’s a key element of understanding this particular character. The speaker (Beloved) is childlike, ghostly, scared, and confused. Her agitated repetition of “I am not dead” makes it feel like she’s desperately holding onto life, and the many echoes of Sethe’s smiling face show the emotional resonance and importance that image carries for Beloved.

Association is also prominent in this example, moving from the house to the sun to the eyes to Sethe’s face. And how about that syntax?! This particular character’s thoughts are so fluid and stream-like that there is no punctuation at all. This adds to the urgency of the passage, the fear, and, finally, the hope.

Want to cite this?

MLA Citation: Delf, Elizabeth. "What is Stream of Consciousness?" Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms, 12 Nov. 2019, Oregon State University, https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-stream-consciousness. Accessed [insert date].

Further Resources for Teachers

William Faulkner's "Barn Burning" offers a short glimpse into the young boy Sarty's "stream-of-consciousness" thought processes.  At the start of the story, Sarty identifies the man who tries to prosecute his pyromaniac father as his "father's enemy" before thinking " our enemy...ourn! mine and hisn both!  He's my father! "

Writing Prompt: How does the form of Sarty's thoughts relate to the stream-of-consciousness form described in the above video?  What anxieties or tensions does this repetition reveal in Sarty's worldview, and how do these tensions foreshadow later elements in the plot?

Interested in more video lessons? View the full series:

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15 Exceptional Stream of Consciousness Writers

Looking to see what happens inside a character’s thoughts? Check out these fifteen stream of consciousness writers.

Stream of consciousness writers forgo dialogue and traditional prose, writing instead entirely from the point of view of their main character, telling that character’s inner thoughts and personal dialogue. This  literary device gives the writing a unique feel and provides the reader with insight into what the character is feeling and thinking throughout the story’s events.

The phrase stream of consciousness first hit the literary criticism world when critic May Sinclair borrowed the phrase from a popular psychology book and applied it to the work of novelist Dorothy Richardson. This writing style became very popular in the early to mid-20th century, though it still appears in modern novels.

As you discover stream of consciousness writers, choose carefully. This writing style takes skill to master. Nevertheless, here are fifteen who have done it well.

1. Virginia Woolf

2. james joyce, 3. william faulkner, 4. william james, 5. dorothy richardson, 6. henry james, 7. marcel proust, 8. jack kerouac, 9. leo tolstoy, 10. t.s. eliot, 11. samuel beckett, 12. sylvia plath, 13. jose saramago, 14. fyodor dostoyevsky, 15. toni morrison, stream of consciousness writers to discover for yourself.

Stream of consciousness writing can be challenging to read. If you are ready to indulge in seeing the inner thoughts of a character, here are some authors who are known for using this literary device masterfully.

Virginia Woolf’s famous novel Mrs. Dalloway follows a middle-aged society woman throughout her day, following the main character’s thoughts in interior monologue. She is considered the pioneer of the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique and also wrote To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own. Her works are highly poetic and were considered very experimental at the time.

• Woolf, Virginia (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 108 Pages - 01/01/2021 (Publication Date) - Independently published (Publisher)

Irish novelist, poet, and short-story writer James Joyce is called one of the most influential 20th-century writers. His novel Ulysses is a perfect example of stream-of-consciousness writing, following the encounters of Leopold Bloom as he goes about a typical day in Dublin. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is another famous work that many believe is a bit of a self-portrait of Joyce’s own thoughts.

We have many more articles on famous poets from around the globe. Why not check out our list of the best famous Irish poets ? Or use the search bar at the top right of the page to search for the best authors in a country or region you are interested in.

• James Joyce (Author)
• 736 Pages - 01/15/2010 (Publication Date) - Wordsworth Editions Ltd (Publisher)

Perhaps one of the most significant American writers, William Faulkner, wrote about the Old South and was awarded the  Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949  for his work. His fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury, depicts the stream of consciousness in one of its four sections, where Quentin Compson, one of the main characters, details his thoughts before committing suicide.

The unconventional narrative style of the rest of the book meant critics rejected it at first, but today it’s considered a literary masterpiece.

• Used Book in Good Condition
• Faulkner, William (Author)
• 326 Pages - 10/01/1990 (Publication Date) - Vintage (Publisher)

Most famous for his 1,200-page work The Principles of Psychology, psychologist William James explores what makes up the stream of thought in the human being. He is credited with coining the term stream of consciousness, and though he did not write fiction works in this field, he did give the English language a new literary term.

• James, William (Author)
• 574 Pages - 02/18/2017 (Publication Date) - CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (Publisher)

Dorothy Richardson was a middle-class woman from a suburb of Oxford. She began her writing career with essays and journalistic pieces for magazines, and her work, Pilgrimage, Richardson shows the internal monologue of her character. The work spans three novels and follows a central character, Miriam Henderson, modeled on the author’s own life story.

• Richardson, Dorothy (Author)
• 152 Pages - 12/29/2015 (Publication Date) - CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (Publisher)

American and British author Henry James helped create the transition between realism and modernism with his writing around the turn of the 20th century. He used the stream-of-consciousness technique in portions of The Portrait of a Lady. Henry James was the brother of William James, who coined the term.

• James, Henry (Author)
• 458 Pages - 09/13/2021 (Publication Date) - Digireads.com (Publisher)

Marcel Proust  was ahead of his time with the use of stream of consciousness, which shows up in his novel series In Search of Lost Time, published between 1913 and 1927. Though not a perfect example, this novel shows the internal thoughts of characters regularly and sets the stage for what would become a more common literary technique in the future.

• Proust, Marcel (Author)
• 4211 Pages - 06/03/2003 (Publication Date) - Modern Library (Publisher)

In his 1957 novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac follows Sal Paradise as he travels across the United States. It follows one single train of thought throughout the piece, and Kerouac actually typed the piece using one continuous reel of paper. Time Magazine named this one of the 100 best English language novels from 1923 to 2005.

• Jack Kerouac (Author)
• 293 Pages - 06/01/1999 (Publication Date) - Penguin Classics (Publisher)

Famous Russian author Leo Tolstoy used stream of consciousness in Anna Karenina, an 1878 novel that explores Imperial Russian society and has been the subject of theater, film, television, and, even ballet performances. Though the entire novel is not an example of a literary device, instead, it employs it several times. Tolstoy is considered one of the top writers in Russian history, and he is also the author of the famous War and Peace. 

• Tolstoy, Leo (Author)
• 590 Pages - 11/08/2020 (Publication Date) - Independently published (Publisher)

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a poem by T.S. Eliot that uses a stream of consciousness to tell the narrator’s thoughts. By employing the point of view of Prufrock, Eliot is able to show just how disjointed and unclear his thought process is. The reader feels that the poem is slightly confusing, but that is because the way the human mind jumps from thought to thought is also disjointed.

• Hardcover Book
• T. S. Eliot (Author)
• 67 Pages - 12/06/2002 (Publication Date) - Amereon Ltd (Publisher)

In his trilogy that includes Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett employs stream-of-consciousness writing. Unfortunately, the plots of these stories are fairly weak because the writer’s primary goal is to keep the narration going to show the character’s thoughts 

• Samuel Beckett (Author)
• 416 Pages - 06/16/2009 (Publication Date) - Grove Press (Publisher)

Sylvia Plath is a poet and novelist who used the technique in her writing. Her novel, The Bell Jar, tells of a young woman’s journey with depression from her own point of view. Stream of consciousness writing makes this piece particularly powerful, as the reader gets a glimpse into the disordered thinking that comes with mental illnesses of depression and anxiety.

• Great product!
• Plath, Sylvia (Author)
• 244 Pages - 08/02/2005 (Publication Date) - Harper Perennial Modern Classics (Publisher)

Jose Saramago wrote in the stream-of-consciousness style quite frequently. In addition, he often dropped the punctuation from his dialogues to create an endless flow of ideas, and this style mirrors how thoughts flow through an individual’s brain. His work Blindness is a clear example of using this writing style, and he won the Nobel Prize in 1998 .

• Saramago, Jose (Author)
• 304 Pages - 09/01/1998 (Publication Date) - Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Publisher)

While he may be best known for Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky employed the stream-of-consciousness style in a novella he published in 1864 entitled Notes from Underground. Both works are considered classics of Russian literature. In Notes from Underground, the main character, Underground Man, writes in a continuous train of thought using commas and brackets, but not sentences. 

• translation

Finally, Toni Morrison wrote often on slavery, and Beloved is one of her novels that uses a stream of consciousness. While the technique is not used in the entire novel, she uses it expertly in one of the last chapters as she intermingles the thoughts of three of the characters into one tangled mess. The modern African-American novelist often wrote of the difficulties faced by black Americans.

If you want to learn how to begin writing stream of consciousness then check out our guide to exploring stream of consciousness is here to help! Or if you want to read the best books from the best authors, you can search for them on our website using our search bar.

• towering achievement
• Toni Morrison (Author)
• 321 Pages - 06/08/2004 (Publication Date) - Vintage (Publisher)

Bryan Collins is the owner of Become a Writer Today. He's an author from Ireland who helps writers build authority and earn a living from their creative work. He's also a former Forbes columnist and his work has appeared in publications like Lifehacker and Fast Company.

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How to Write Stream Of Consciousness

Last Updated: January 1, 2024 Approved

This article was co-authored by Alexander Peterman, MA . Alexander Peterman is a Private Tutor in Florida. He received his MA in Education from the University of Florida in 2017. There are 7 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. wikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. In this case, several readers have written to tell us that this article was helpful to them, earning it our reader-approved status. This article has been viewed 231,661 times.

One way to cultivate your emotional and poetic mind, and to improve your writing skills in general, is to write in the stream-of-consciousness style. This is unstructured, unedited writing that reflects your (or a character’s) observations or feelings about a certain person, event, or item. It’s intended to mirror the way internal thoughts in the mind work – quickly processing thoughts and switching from one topic to another. Stream-of-consciousness is a good way to write poetry or journals, and can end with a piece of writing that can be as much graphic as verbal.

Sample Freewrites

Writing Stream of Consciousness

• Literally any topic will do, as long as you have something to say about it – even if it doesn't seem like much at first.
• Using this method, you can connect topics that seem unrelated. For example, you could begin discussing a certain character who loves roses and then immediately switch to a childhood memory of your mother’s rose bushes. This is the way thoughts often work in our heads – so it is also a great way to show how a character thinks and connects ideas in their mind.

• Ignore sentence structure. You could do an entire page of adjectives, verbs, or nouns related to your topic. Or you could do short phrases, or whatever else comes to mind, as long as it illustrates the character’s thought patterns in a pointed, methodical way.

• Switch tasks for a little while before coming back to your writing. It doesn’t matter if it’s a few hours or a few days as long as you come back to your writing with a fresh outlook.
• This type of writing can allow you to provide interesting insights or connections that people normally wouldn’t see. It’s valuable to save this work for future reference to look back over what kinds of connections you made between ideas.
• Even if it’s weird or bad, make sure you save your writing. You may want to come back to it at a later time or include it elsewhere in your work.

• Many famous authors have implemented this strategy in their writing – including James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf.

• You could try reading "Mrs. Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf, Ulysses by James Joyce or As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.

Using Freewriting as Practice

• The main idea is to keep writing for as long as you can and never take the pen off the paper until the timer dings. This allows you to write more than you think you can and to see how your brain works connecting various thoughts and topics.
• This makes for great practice for stream-of-consciousness writing because it will give you a model to follow when writing the inner monologues of your characters in the stream-of-consciousness form.

• Freewriting requires a kind of natural rhythm that is hard to replicate when typing on the computer.
• Make sure you have extra paper, a pencil sharpener if you’re using a pencil, or an extra pen.
• If you are on a touchscreen, then try to activate software for drawing writing and test a few actions for comfort and tool sets.

• The most important thing is to find a place where you can sit comfortably and not be disturbed.

• Use different colors of pen or pencil. You could change colors every letter, or every word, or in a way that makes the overall work look pleasing. This can be done at any time.
• Keep writing until you run out of words. But try to push yourself to keep writing until the time is up.
• Set a timer for the amount of time you want to write and put it somewhere where you can’t see how much time is left. Keep writing without distraction until you hear the timer go off.

• Freewriting lets you track how your mind roams freely without the constraints of normal writing (thought filtering) processes.
• Use freewriting as a time to go on tangents and make jumps between topics.

• If you are writing methodically in the freewriting practice, this is also a great way to show how surprising connections can be made between obscure or seemingly unrelated topics. Flowing between ideas allows the connections to be made clearer.

Community Q&A

• Practice other types of writing as well. Your writing will improve with practice. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• It helps to have a thesaurus on hand if you’re doing a list of adjectives, or for some other things. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• It’s best to work on stream-of-consciousness writing when you have a lot of time. Sometimes you can get caught up in what you’re writing, and nothing’s worse than being interrupted in the middle of a good idea. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

Things You'll Need

• Writing implement
• Thesaurus (optional)

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://dversepoets.com/2012/05/24/stream-of-conscousness-writing/
• ↑ https://writersedit.com/literary-devices-stream-consciousness/
• ↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/revising-drafts/
• ↑ https://thewritepractice.com/stream-of-consciousness/
• ↑ https://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb/freewrite.html
• ↑ https://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/composition/brainstorm_freewrite.htm
• ↑ https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/how-to-use-stream-of-consciousness/#

About This Article

To write stream-of-consciousness, start by choosing a character or subject to write about. Next, let the words flow without worrying about capitalization, grammar, punctuation, spelling, or sentence structure. You can write whatever comes to mind, whether that's short phrases, fragmented feelings, or even collections of adjectives, verbs, or nouns! Don't be afraid to veer off-topic, as well. Then, look back over what you wrote to revise the content, drawing associations and gaining insight as you work through it. For more tips on practicing this writing style, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Stream of consciousness writing

by NikkiYoungAuthor | Sep 28, 2020

Planning your writing is important, but delving into your consciousness can also be a rewarding and fun way to practise.

In my last blog, I talked about planning and I’m a huge advocate of doing this. From starting with a blank page, planning helps you formalise your characters and plot so that you’re ready to go.

I don’t write my novels without carefully planning them first, BUT, when it comes to writing practice, it isn’t always necessary. There is a lot to be said for just going for it and seeing what happens. That’s where stream of consciousness writing comes in.

When you write without overthinking it, magic can happen.

Writing without editing, when you put down the ideas and thoughts that come into your mind, is called stream of consciousness writing. Quite a lot of the time, when you do this, you won’t like what you write, but there are moments of genius too when you will look at your writing and think ‘did I really just write that?’.

This next thought comes courtesy of Elizabeth Gilbert in her book, Big Magic: Imagine that ideas are like little spirits, floating around in the atmosphere, waiting for the right person to come along. Opening your mind to the idea of these spirits sends out a signal to them that you’re willing and available.

Let them in and they will work their way through your mind and out through your fingers.

Yes, I know. It’s a crazy idea. But I just love it. And it really works when practicing stream of consciousness writing.

It’s the idea of clearing your mind, opening it up to new ideas and letting the ideas flow. A bit like in the way you would practice mindfulness or meditation. Many creative processes work this way and writing is no different in that respect.

Try it for yourself.

Find a quiet place and clear your thoughts of all the other things you need to do. Choose a prompt, close your eyes and think about the prompt for a moment or two, then set a timer for five minutes and go for it.

The more you do this, the better at it you will become. and being able to work this way is really helpful, not just in a blank page situation when you’re feeling stuck, but also in an exam, when you’re under a time pressure and have to come up with something that you haven’t been able to previously plan.

Here’s an example.

The prompt was ‘Lost’.

Walking through the woods. All the paths look the same. Strewn with dead leaves, brown, read and orange, crunching under my feet, my steps in time with the pulsing in my ears; the beat I’m keeping in my mind. I’m trying not to admit it, but it looks like I’m lost. My eyes can’t focus properly. I’m seeing tree after tree, one bare trunk after another, all blurring into one. It’s making me dizzy. That, and the unpredictability of my situation. If I don’t see something I recognise soon, I don’t know what I’ll do. SNAP. I hear the cracking of a dead branch. It echoes through the unforgiving forest. My heart leaps as at the same time, out leaps a deer. She stops dead, eying me with suspicion. Show me the way out of here, I plead with my mind, though my body stays stock still. She strolls away, knowing there is no threat and I find myself wishing her to return. The loneliness is palpable and I have to face the ultimate decision – do I keep walking, stumbling blindly through this never-ending maze, or do I wait, hoping someone might come to my rescue? I suddenly wish I’d been paying more attention. I never should have come here alone. What was I was thinking? Was I even thinking at all?

Now it’s your turn. Let me know how you get on.

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Boost your creativity with stream-of-consciousness writing

A few days ago, while meditating, a passing thought reminded me that soon, I had to write an article for the Thinkergy Blog. Almost instantly, an idea for a possible topic entered my mind: Create an article about the creative power of stream-of-consciousness writing. Intuitively, the topic idea felt great right away. I could already imagine myself creating the article and picture both the process and the final output in my mental eye. So, here we go.

What is stream-of-consciousness writing?

Stream-of-consciousness writing was originally a literary method that aims to capture the multitude of thoughts and feelings passing through a storyteller’s mind. But SOC-writing is also a powerful individual creativity technique to help creatives to produce better outputs.

When engaging in SOC-writing for some time, you let your thoughts freely flow onto the paper in a nonstop stream of words. Thereby, it’s essential that you keep on jotting down words in a quick, non-judgmental way. So, no criticism, no self-censorship, no editorial corrections — just let the words flow. Of course, the words you write are nothing but verbalizations of your inner thoughts and emotions.

I first came across this powerful individual creativity technique in The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron’s classic book on individual creativity. Cameron advocates that creatives should write “morning pages” as an ideally regular SOC-writing exercise when searching for inspiration and intuitive insights.

“‘I still don’t understand why the pages must be done in the morning. I write so much better at night.’ Let me be clear: good writing is not the point. Think of your pages like a whisk broom. You stick the broom into all the corners of your consciousness. If you do this first thing in the morning, you are laying out your track for the day. Pages tell you of your priorities. With the pages in place first thing, you are much less likely to fall in with others’ agendas. Your day is your own to spend. You’ve claimed it. If you wait to write pages at night, you are reviewing a day that has already happened and that you are powerless to change.”

― Julia Cameron

How to practice stream-of-consciousness writing?

• Go to a quiet place where you are undisturbed for 20-30 minutes (ideally, do this first thing in the morning in line with Julia Cameron’s advice).
• “Start writing no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on,” recommended the US writer Louis L’Amour. So, begin by writing your first word, which can be as simple as “Hello” or “Good morning.” Then just let more and more words flow onto the paper as fast and fluently as possible. Don’t judge and critique your thoughts or edit your notes; just let it flow. Or as the Irish novelist and avid SOC-writing practitioner James Joyce put it, “Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?”
• Ideally, write your SOC notes with a pen on paper or your iPad instead of typing at your computer. Ordinary handwriting tends to bring you easier into a steady flow of writing and a contemplative and even semi-meditative state. Julia Cameron noted in this context that, “Pages must be done longhand. The computer is fast—too fast for our purposes. Writing by computer gets you speed but not depth.”
• When the dedicated time is up, or you feel you’ve exhausted what you want to say, take a brief break and move away.
• Then, come back to your desk to review your notes. Highlight noteworthy thoughts, meaningful insights, exciting ideas, and action plans using different colors and icons for different outputs. Then, add relevant content to your action plans, To Do-list, idea notebook, etc.
• Please take a brief moment to appreciate the effectiveness of your SOC-writing practice with gratitude for the ideas and insights you’ve gained from it. Then, begin with your regular creative work for the day.

“The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you’ll do yourself a service.”

— Stephen Sondheim, American composer and lyricist

In what ways can stream-of-consciousness writing raise your creativity?

SOC-writing can open up blocked channels through which creative (and productive) energy flows. It connects you to your intuitive mind and allows you to tap into the depths of your subconscious mind and perhaps even your spiritual mind (the realm that the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung called the collective unconscious). As such, SOC-writing goes beyond conscious creativity that you can easily assess with simple creativity techniques such as Brainstorming, asking what if-questions, engaging in word associations, etc.). It also allows you to dive into the more mysterious worlds of subconscious and even superconscious creativity. (I discussed these three realms of creativity at length in two earlier articles titled Shifting to the advanced states of human creativity (Part 1 and Part 2 ).

So SOC writing is a technique that allows you to get ideas straight from your subconscious mind – and if you’re really lucky and work on an important creative challenge or project for a longer time, you may even get a breakthrough idea while engaging in SOC writing and incubating on the challenge). (Check out also the article Incubation: A walk on the mysterious side of creativity).

For creatives who are not in flow, such as a writer suffering from a writer’s block or an inventor who’s got stuck resolving a particular engineering problem or design challenge, practicing SOC writing is an effective creative tool to unblock the mental obstacles and get back into flow by allowing your thoughts to freely unfold themselves on paper.

What other benefits can SOC-writing offer to you?

• Balance: SOC-writing can calm, center, and focus your mind when you feel stressed, overwhelmed, confused, or lost in mental clutter. The practice tends to reveal your dominant emotional state that dominates your thinking at present. Our central nervous system tends to respond to the stimuli bombarding us at any moment with positive responses (e.g., contentment, interest, amusement, joy, or love) or non-conducive emotional states (such as restlessness, worry, anxiety, fear, irritation, annoyance, or anger). So early on, after beginning a SOC-writing exercise, check on what emotional state you’re in right now and why you feel that way.
• Productivity: SOC writing can also help you identify and focus your productive energy on those vital few actions that matter most now, which can make the most immediate positive difference in your life today. Insofar, the technique is also an action prioritization tool that can boost your productivity.
• Gratitude: SOC writing also offers you the chance to realize how lucky you are, particularly on days when negative emotional states cloud your thoughts. As such, also early on in a SOC-writing practice session, expressing gratitude by writing down a few things that you feel grateful for in your life today. Relishing a moment of gratitude is also one of the most simple and effective ways to silence the judgmental voice of your biggest enemy: your ego. Your ego is your false self that always wants to have more because it wrongly suggests you are better, more important, and more worthy than others. Your ego is also the arch-enemy of your creativity and productivity because it makes you waste mental energy on obsessing about non-conducive things, situations, and people
• Self-acceptance: In contrast, SOC-writing tends to reconnect you to your true self, your genuine inner voice, your soul, your eternal spirit. Your essential core is who you really are when you resolve to throw away the ridiculous mask that you wear to please others and gain social approval and when you dare to show your true colors. When you insist upon yourself, you are a genuine original. And you can only create original content in moments when you live and voice your unique originality. Geniuses and outstanding creative leaders tend to work at their best and create the most astounding outputs when they’re in perfect harmony with their authentic selves.

“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the Weather.”

— Bill Hicks, American stand-up comedian

• Issue identification: At times, the barriers blocking your creative and productive channels may be related to certain people, situations, events, and actions. SOC-writing allows you to identify the external factors and forces that have brought you out of balance and devise action strategies on how to best deal with those limiting circumstances to return to the flow zone of easy, effortless, and enjoyable creativity and productivity.
• Empathy: Suppose certain people are the source of your stress. In that case, SOC-writing can also provide you with an opportunity to empathize with these persons on a deeper level and to improve interpersonal relationships. As stated before, the technique tends to connect us to our soul, which intuitively understands the interconnectedness of everything and thinks in win-wins. So, walk a mile in the shoes of other stakeholders involved, and look at the taxing situation through their points of view.

Conclusion: SOC-writing connects you to your creativity and spirituality

“If you work on your creativity, you will grow spiritually. If you work on your spirituality, you will grow creatively. Creativity and spirituality are so close they are intertwined. We call God ‘the Creator’ without realizing it is another word for ‘artist.’ The Creator is the consummate artist. As we explore and express our artistry, we are imitating God. Is it any wonder we begin to find spiritual support?”

“A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life,” noted the American writer Tobias Wolff. Forgive me if this article isn’t up to your expectations — I wrote it as a SOC-writing exercise to stay true to the topic. I withdrew myself from the world for almost two hours and then just let the words flow out of my mind. Later in the afternoon, I typed the text. The next day, I gave it a gentle editorial treatment, thereby spicing up my output by adding relevant quotes from Julia Cameron and other creators sharing worthwhile thoughts on SOC writing. But the core of this article reflects my voice – how I practice SOC-writing, why it’s a valuable tool for creative professionals, and why I believe you should experiment with it and consider adding it to your personal creative toolkit.

“I am rooted, but I flow,” noted the English author Virginia Woolf, one of the pioneers of stream-of-consciousness writing as a narrative device. SOC- writing can make you more centered, aware, grateful, authentic, insightful, empathetic, creative, and productive. So — when will you start streaming the words of your consciousness to the world?

• We teach many other creative power tools that enhance your intuitive mind and creativity in our Genius Journey training courses and creative leadership development programs .
• Contact us if you’d like to learn more about the Genius Journey method or if you need any inspiration or advice for your company’s creativity and innovation challenges in these trying times.

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2021

Credits: Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash

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9 Stream of Consciousness

Dora Zhang is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at University of California, Berkeley. She is author of Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel (2020).

• Published: 11 August 2021
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Few terms are more associated with the innovations of modernist fiction—and Virginia Woolf’s novels in particular—than ‘stream of consciousness’, yet the contours of the term often remain vague. This chapter argues that Woolf makes distinctive contributions to the genre that have been underrecognized both because of its gendered association with formlessness, and because stream of consciousness is often simply conflated with interior monologue, which she mostly did not use. Instead, Woolf’s contributions include her use of free indirect discourse to overcome the egotism of the first person, experiments with rendering collective streams of consciousness in Between the Acts , and finally, her use of analogies to evoke the feeling of thinking, which also illuminates unappreciated links to William James, the psychologist who coined the term together, Woolf’s strategies refute the charge of intense individualism that is often levied at stream-of-consciousness writing.

Few terms are as associated with the formal innovations of the modernist novel as stream of consciousness , a mode of writing that records the flickering parade of impressions across a character’s mind from a subjective point of view. Pioneered in the English tradition by Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf is acknowledged to be one of its most skilled practitioners. But despite the ubiquitous familiarity of the term in general, and its association with Woolf in particular, her innovations in this arena have not been clearly recognized. This stems first of all from a confusion over whether the term refers to a particular stylistic technique, or whether it refers to something like a genre, constituted by shared themes. 1 ‘Stream of consciousness’ is often used interchangeably with one particular technique: interior monologue. However, this conflation is misleading, and I will use the term to refer to a genre that employs many aesthetic strategies, among which interior monologue is just one. 2 By expanding its definition, we are better equipped to appreciate the range of techniques that make up stream-of-consciousness texts, and Woolf’s contributions in particular. For while it is famously associated with irregular or absent punctuation, fragmented or incomplete sentences, ellipses, and discontinuous syntax, as in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses , Woolf’s innovations in stream of consciousness writing announce themselves more quietly. Moreover, a gendered association of the genre with the personal, the private, the small, and the detail has led writing by women to be more often considered ‘formless’, obscuring the precise nature of their formal contributions.

Woolf’s contributions to stream of consciousness include at least three features, which form my focus here. First, I will look at her virtuosic use of free indirect discourse, which enables her to shift perspectives with unparalleled fluidity, and which in turn allows her to overcome what she herself felt was the great drawback of the novel of subjective experience: the egotism of the first person. Second, I examine Woolf’s experiments with evoking a collective stream of consciousness in her late novel Between the Acts . While there are dangers to collective thinking, as Woolf, a vocal critic of fascism, was well aware, she was also drawn to moments of shared perception as a way of overcoming individual isolation. Third, I make the case that her use of analogies, something not ordinarily associated with stream of consciousness, constitutes an important technique of this genre. These analogies, which are directed above all at conveying the feeling of being conscious, also illuminate unappreciated links between Woolf and William James, the psychologist who popularized the term. Taken together, Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness strategies refute a major critique of this genre: its intense individualism and liability to lapse into solipsism.

Early Tributaries

But first, let us return to the head of the stream. The term is usually credited to William James, specifically the famous ‘Stream of Thought’ chapter of his 1890 Principles of Psychology . 3 Insisting on the continuous rather than successive nature of thought, James writes:

Consciousness … does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. 4

Literary commentators have rarely paid close attention to the meaning of this term and its significance in James, and I will return to his affiliations with Woolf towards the end of the chapter. Suffice it for now to note that James was deploying the metaphor in order to refute Associationism, the prevailing theory of mind at the time in which substantive thoughts occurred in consciousness discretely and discontinuously. For James, the problem with Associationism was that it tended to both emphasize and atomize the terms being associated (i.e. ideas) at the expense of the actual association (i.e. the relations) between them. As we will see, it was precisely these relations that Woolf, too, sought to capture.

The literary usage of ‘stream of consciousness’ was first introduced by May Sinclair in a 1918 review of Dorothy Richardson’s novels in The Egoist . ‘Nothing happens’, Sinclair wrote, ‘It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on.’ 5 From the first, this mode was understood as an attempt to obtain direct contact with its object—called variously consciousness, experience, reality, or life—without mediation or intervention, and freed from the falsification of plot and story. Joyce and Richardson were cited as pioneers of the method, but Woolf ’s name was rarely absent from any discussion, usually evoked as one of its most prominent practitioners. So in a 1926 article in The Atlantic defending stream-of-consciousness fiction from those who called it ‘an eccentric fad’, Ethel Wallace Hawkins wrote, ‘the evolution—or, more accurately, the gradual intensification—of this method may best be traced in the three novels of Virginia Woolf— The Voyage Out , Jacob’s Room , and Mrs Dalloway . 6 By the end of the 1920s, after the publication of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse , as well as nine volumes of Richardson’s Pilgrimage sequence, Ulysses , and The Sound and the Fury , stream of consciousness had become the hallmark of the modern novelist. 7 Joseph Warren Beach and Percy Lubbock both used the term in their influential treatises on the craft of fiction, and by 1927, the phrase was familiar enough that the American writer and critic Katherine Fullerton Gerould could write in The Saturday Review , ‘I do not know whence the phrase came, nor does it matter, since it has become familiar to us all within the last decade.’ 8

Genre and Gender

While stream of consciousness quickly spread across the literary landscape in the early twentieth century, it was not universally praised. Common criticisms charged it with tedium, self-absorption, and triviality. Lamenting the absence of drama and action in the style, Gerould concluded, ‘the dullness of books like “Dark Laughter” and “Mrs Dalloway” almost makes the comic strips seem amusing’; and D.H. Lawrence famously remarked caustically, ‘ “Did I feel a twinge in my little toe or didn’t I”, asks every character of Mr Joyce, Miss Richardson or M. Proust.’ 9 Although these criticisms extended to male as well as female writers, it is important to note that stream of consciousness was, from the first, discussed in gendered terms. The idea that the genre was formless, that it was concerned only with trivialities, and that it was self-involved were all cast in terms of gendered binaries: soft versus hard, small versus big, internal versus external, and individual versus social. It also fell on one side of a gendered divide within the tropology of modernist poetics: the very metaphor of the stream, with its associations of vague, misty, amorphous flow, contrasts with the valorizations of the hard, rigid, precise, and granite in the poetics of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and T.E. Hulme, among others. 10 The charges of formlessness, or absent or failed design, were also levelled much more at female writers like Woolf, Richardson, and Katherine Mansfield. In contrast, a male stream-of-consciousness writer like Joyce was more often credited with being guided by intellect rather than ‘intuition’ or ‘impression’, and what might be called the absence of form in one context became innovative and revolutionary in another. 11 Stream-of-consciousness writing was and, in many ways, remains associated with the delicate, the miniature, the precious, and disorganized detail over the cohesive pattern—all decidedly feminized traits. 12

At the same time, the supposedly feminine nature of this style was sometimes a rallying cry for its practitioners. In a 1938 foreword to Pilgrimage Richardson characterized her project as forging a new literary form in an attempt ‘to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism’. 13 Feminine prose, she wrote, ‘should properly be unpunctuated, moving from point to point without formal obstructions’. 14 In reviewing volumes of Pilgrimage , Woolf too aligned Richardson’s linguistic innovation with her womanhood. ‘She has invented … a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender. It is of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes’ ( E 3 367). We cannot fail to be reminded here of Woolf’s own formulation of the aim of the novel in manifestos such as ‘Modern Fiction’. While conceding that Richardson is working on ‘an infinitely smaller scale’, Woolf does not hesitate to rank her achievement with that of Chaucer, Donne, and Dickens, each of whom has also shown that the heart ‘is a body which moves perpetually, and is thus always standing in a new relation to the emotions which are its sun’ ( E 3 367).

In alluding to the smallness of the scale on which Richardson is working, Woolf is highlighting a criticism that she herself often encountered. The charge of triviality levelled at stream-of-consciousness texts depends on assumptions about whose interiority is worthy of representation, and whose experience can stand for broader conditions or reach out toward larger social, historical threads, instead of remaining confined to the personal. Woolf herself resisted the usual hierarchies of size and value, insisting, ‘let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small’ ( E 4 161). We may certainly take her to task for not expanding the purview of her own representations of consciousness beyond a relatively narrow segment of the upper middle class, but this does not thereby negate the importance of her assertion that ‘everything is the proper stuff of fiction’ ( E 4 164). 15

Woolf’s point can also be read in light of a Marxist critique of stream of consciousness within a wider critique of modernism as representative of a bourgeois individualism. 16 In this view, where modernist works are said to retreat into fragmented, private, subjective perspectives and abandon any attempt to represent an objective social totality, stream of consciousness would appear to be the very embodiment of an alienated, reified form. But whatever the merits of such a critique as a demystification of modernist ideology, we should also not overlook the gendered assumptions it contains. In many ways it extends an old association of the feminine with interiority and the private and domestic spheres, in contrast to the outward-looking masculine domains of political and economic history. But of course, the doctrine of the separate spheres is something that feminist critics have long refuted, not least Woolf herself. In ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, she grounds her critique of the Edwardians in the fact that while the nature of social relationships has changed, the forms of the novel have not kept up. ‘When human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature’ ( E 3 422). As Nancy Armstrong observes, for Woolf, history does not take place in the world outside the house: ‘Rather, history makes its mark on human experience in such small personal ways as when “Mrs Brown took out her little white handkerchief and began to dab her eyes.” Here, at the centers of little networks of human relations, occur those changes that will eventually show in “religion, conduct, politics, and literature.” ’ 17 The idea that stream of consciousness is simply expressive of a bourgeois individualist ideology has caused it to be regarded with a certain embarrassment among leftist critics. But I argue here that Woolf’s contributions to the genre—by experimenting with collective streams, and by attempting to capture the nuances of ‘networks of human relations’ within the form of the novel—allow us to re-evaluate the association of stream of consciousness with solipsistic interiority.

Interior Monologue and Free Indirect Discourse

We have seen some criticisms of stream of consciousness, but even sympathizers noted the formal challenges posed by the attempt to represent consciousness in a new way. These challenges centred especially on the limitations of interior monologue and its first-person perspective. In a 1921 interview entitled ‘The Future of the Novel’, May Sinclair observes that while stream of consciousness was the developmental endpoint of the psychological novel, it is really only suited to novels that centre on a single character and a single point of view. ‘It certainly remains to be seen whether it will be successful in dealing with groups of characters all equally important.’ 18 Moreover, by inhabiting characters’ perspectives so thoroughly, readers are prevented from knowing more than the characters do. According to Sinclair, the challenge for authors, then, is to ‘present things so that they appear both as they really are and as they appear to the consciousness of his one subject’. 19

These reservations were shared by Woolf herself. In her diaries she criticized the ‘egotistic’ tendency in Joyce ( D 2 189), writing a little later, ‘if one lets the mind run loose it becomes egotistic; personal, which I detest’ ( D 2 321). While this passage has sometimes been read as evidence of Woolf’s competitive anxieties about her achievements in light of Joyce’s, we should take it seriously as an expression of her aesthetic priorities, whatever its merits (or lack thereof) as an assessment of Joyce’s work. For Woolf, the problem of egotism is exemplified by the dominance of a single perspective, as in interior monologue. These limitations are especially clear in the novel that Joyce credited with inaugurating the method of interior monologue, Édouard Dujardin’s Les lauriers sont coupés (1888). In this passage, the narrator, Daniel Prince, is preparing to leave a restaurant. ‘I get up; I put my coat back on; the waiter’s pretending to help me; thank you; my hat; my gloves; here in my pocket; I’m going … a waiter opens the door for me; good night; it’s cold; let’s button up my coat.’ 20 The exposition in the first person here is not only awkward but also creates a sense of claustrophobia when sustained over the course of the novel. We never get access to the thoughts of any other character, including Léa, the actress who is the object of Daniel’s affection.

Joyce circumvents the limitations of the single perspective in Ulysses by gathering a chorus of voices, and by eliminating the narration of exposition he mitigates the clumsiness of Dujardin. But to do so Joyce has to mix interior monologue with other narrative modes, including free indirect discourse, supplementing the first person with the third. And while different points of view are represented in Ulysses , as in other prominent stream of consciousness works such as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury , narrative perspective is organized by chapter and remains discretely divided. That is, the gathering of multiple voices remains separated, with transitions from one perspective to another clearly marked. Woolf’s innovation lies in the fluidity, subtlety, and frequency with which she shifts between points of view without imposing boundaries between them. Moreover, by playing perspectives against one another, her use of the ‘dual voice’ of free indirect discourse also answers Sinclair’s second challenge to stream of consciousness, enabling her to present things both as they are and as they appear to a perceiving subject. 21

To be sure, Woolf is by no means the first writer to employ free indirect discourse, which has been used in the English novel since at least Jane Austen. Gustave Flaubert brought it to prominence in the European novel in the mid-nineteenth century, and by the modernist period this technique was ubiquitous. Free indirect discourse is a particularly novelistic grammatical form that combines elements of both direct and indirect speech, eliminating the first-person pronoun and replacing it with a third-person ‘he’ or ‘she’ rendered subjective. Suppressing the quotation marks that are characteristic of direct speech, it nevertheless represents the thoughts, speech, and perceptions of a character directly, without the intervention of a narrator who reports or comments on them. 22 When early on in Mrs Dalloway we read, ‘But how strange, on entering the Park, the silence; the mist; the hum … and who should be coming along with his back against the Government buildings, most appropriately, carrying a dispatch box stamped with the Royal Arms, who but Hugh Whitbread; her old friend Hugh—the admirable Hugh!’ ( MD 5) we understand that even though this passage is written in the third person, we’re witnessing Clarissa thinking these thoughts, rather than receiving a report of her thoughts from a narrator. Instead of being told what a character is perceiving, saying, or thinking, free indirect discourse grants direct access to a character’s mind. In her diaries Woolf acknowledges her preference for ‘oratio obliqua’ ( D 3 106), as she called it, contrasting it with her ‘few direct sentences’, and indeed most of her mature fiction is written in this style, with the notable exception of The Waves .

In addition to allowing us to inhabit a character’s perspective with great intimacy, free indirect discourse also enables the narrative to move easily between different minds, all looking out onto the same external world. Sometimes, the shift occurs within a single sentence, as in this example from the climactic dinner scene in the first section of To the Lighthouse : ‘What damned rot they talk, thought Charles Tansley, laying down his spoon precisely in the middle of his plate, which he had swept clean, as if, Lily thought (he sat opposite to her with his back to the window precisely in the middle of view), he were determined to make sure of his meals’ ( TL 115). In one economical sentence Woolf reveals a number of things: Charles Tansley’s resentment (born of shame about his poverty coupled with his sense of intellectual superiority), Lily Briscoe’s perceptiveness, underscoring her role as the novel’s chief observer, and her dislike of Tansley (spurred by his misogyny), which is tinged here with a certain class prejudice of her own—she sees him as determined to make sure of his meals because she finds him smug and self-serving, but there’s also an implicit sneer at his eagerness for food. In this passage the pivot in the perspective shift is the spoon, which Charles Tansley lays down in the middle of his plate—and the sentence—as if for Lily to pick up as we move into her point of view. This move is typical of Woolf, who tends to use a publicly observable fact, in this case the plate and the spoon, as a hinge to shift between different characters’ perspectives and their private thoughts. In scenes such as these, free indirect discourse allows for layered and refracted descriptions that tell us something about both the observer and the observed, revealing not only insights of individual psychology but also of social analysis.

Woolf is especially interested in the epistemological affordances of the play of perspectives that opens up once narration is liberated from the tyranny of the first person. Her novelistic universe is woven through piecing together fragments—sometimes very brief, sometimes quite extended—from a tapestry of perspectives. 23 Accordingly, Woolf’s use of free indirect discourse is especially effective in scenes that bring together a variety of people, whether during a family dinner, on a busy London street, or at a glittering party, as we see in this passage below from Mrs Dalloway involving Ellie Henderson, Clarissa’s poorer, shabbier cousin, and Richard Dalloway.

‘Well, Ellie, and how’s the world treating you ?’ [Richard Dalloway] said in his genial way, and Ellie Henderson, getting nervous and flushing and feeling that it was extraordinarily nice of him to come and talk to her, said that many people really felt the heat more than the cold. ‘Yes they do,’ said Richard Dalloway. ‘Yes.’ But what more did one say? ‘Hullo, Richard,’ said somebody, taking him by the elbow, and, good Lord, there was old Peter, old Peter Walsh. He was delighted to see him—ever so pleased to see him! … And off they went together walking right across the room, giving each other little pats, as if they hadn’t met for a long time, Ellie Henderson thought, watching them go, certainly she knew that man’s face. A tall man, middle aged, rather fine eyes, dark, wearing spectacles, with a look of John Burrows. ( MD 169–70)

In the space of a few lines, we see the interaction from both Ellie and Richard’s perspectives—his sense of obligation to talk to her, her nervousness in front of her grander relatives—in what is roughly the literary equivalent of a split screen with subtitles of thoughts. Note that the perspective in the line ‘But what more did one say?’ is ambiguous; it could belong to either Ellie or Richard, or in fact both, briefly uniting them in a moment of shared social unease. When the pause is broken by the appearance of Peter Walsh, Ellie’s observation of him gives us the only external description of Peter that we get in the book. Coming so close to the end, it is defamiliarizing to see a character whom we have known so intimately be described as ‘a tall man, middle aged … dark, wearing spectacles’, but it shows us a view of him that accords with the knowledge of the describer, in this case Ellie, situating both perceiver and perceived within layered psychological and sociological matrices.

‘One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with’, Lily Briscoe thinks in To the Lighthouse , ‘Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman [Mrs Ramsay] with’ ( TL 198). With free indirect discourse, Woolf finds the linguistic resources to represent the perspectives of fifty pairs of eyes, as well as some eyeless ones representing ‘the world seen without a self’ ( W 287). The world is pieced together from what is seen through these individual points of view, and through them the reader is granted from moment to moment the intimate knowledge of another that Lily Briscoe seeks. One of Woolf’s great themes is the limits of what we can know of other people, and the gap between the public and the private self is at once a philosophical problem stemming from the fact that we never have access to other people’s minds, and also a social problem about how we fashion ourselves according to certain conventions, as well as how we read each other according to such predetermined categories. She thus uses free indirect discourse to enact on the level of form something her novels are preoccupied with on the level of theme. For Sinclair, the challenge of the stream-of-consciousness writer was to ‘present things so that they appear both as they really are and as they appear to the consciousness of his one subject’. Woolf does not posit any simple objective/subjective divide between things as they are and things as they appear, but by stitching together multiple perspectives with unprecedented fluidity, she creates a common reality while allowing her readers glimpses of how this reality is differently experienced by different subjects.

‘I rejected, we substituted’: Collective Streams

Even as it remains true that, for Woolf, the supreme mystery remains, ‘here was one room, there another’ ( MD 127), in her works the acute awareness of the breach between two minds is balanced by brief moments of communal feeling. Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually taken to be concerned exclusively with individual minds; an idea exacerbated by its conflation with interior monologue. But in the late fiction, we see Woolf’s experiments with free indirect discourse take on yet another, less recognized dimension: the rendering of collective consciousness. The best-known novel that experiments with a group is, of course, The Waves , which is sometimes described as six voices raised in a single soliloquy. But the characters of Bernard, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, Ginny, and Louis retain distinct perceptions, even as they also seem to have an uncanny access to each other’s thoughts. I will return to The Waves momentarily in order to consider the dangers of communal feeling, but first, I want to look at several moments in a lesser-known novel, Between the Acts (1941), when a group of characters seem to be thinking and perceiving as one. The idea that stream-of-consciousness writing is solely individualistic has obscured Woolf’s interest in rendering collective streams, while the failure to recognize her experiments in this regard has exacerbated a narrow view of the genre.

Woolf’s interest in group consciousness was not isolated among her contemporaries. There was a flurry of interest in ideas of ‘group mind’, crowd theory, and group psychology in the early decades of the twentieth century, especially after the outbreak of World War I, and again in the 1930s as the prospect of World War II loomed. As Allen McLaurin has documented, Woolf and her Bloomsbury associates were aware of and fascinated by these developments. 24 In 1913 Woolf reviewed a novel by the French writer Jules Romains, leader of the Unanimism movement, which propounded the doctrine of a communal psychic life among groups, and McLaurin proposes that Romains had an unacknowledged influence on Woolf. 25 Fascinating as this intellectual history is, what I am concerned with here are the ways in which shared perceptions find formal expression in free indirect discourse.

It should not be surprising that we find it in Between the Acts , a novel that takes community—that of a family, a village, and a nation—as its theme. The story is set in a bucolic English village, where Miss La Trobe, a misfit outcast, directs the annual village pageant, which tells of the history of the England. In the novel, which begins and ends with the Olivers, a family of landed gentry, there are several noteworthy interludes of anonymous, collective speech among the villagers who form the audience for the pageant. ‘… Dressing up. That’s the great thing, dressing up. And it’s pleasant now, the sun’s not so hot … That’s one good the war brought us—longer days … Where did we leave off? D’you remember? The Elizabethans … Perhaps she’ll reach the present, if she skips … D’you think people change? Their clothes, of course … But I mean ourselves …’ ( BA 121, original ellipses). These overheard snatches of conversation are so many elliptical ‘scraps, orts, and fragments’ ( BA 188); they form momentary lines of continuity and response, but the voices remain distinct, even if anonymously grouped together.

Subtler and more merged are the moments when characters seem to perceive together as one, as in this early scene when a group of young people are preparing the barn for the pageant:

Young men and women—Jim, Iris, David, Jessica—were even now busy with garlands of red and white paper roses left over from the Coronation. The seeds and the dust from the sacks made them sneeze. Iris had a handkerchief bound round her forehead; Jessica wore breeches. The young men worked in shirt sleeves … ‘Old flimsy’ (Mrs Swithin’s nickname) had been nailing another placard on the Barn … The workers were laughing too, as if old Swithin had left a wake of laughter behind her. The old girl with a wisp of white hair flying, knobbed shoes as if she had claws corned like a canary’s, and black stockings wrinkled over the ankles, naturally made David cock his eye and Jessica wink back, as she handed him a length of paper roses … So they laughed; but respected. If she wore pearls, pearls they were. ( BA 26–7).

The present tense indexicals and past tense, ‘were even now’, along with colloquial language like ‘the old girl’, alert us to the fact that this is free indirect discourse. But whose point of view is being represented? Jim, Iris, David, and Jessica, reminiscent of the sextet of The Waves , are minor characters who are only briefly mentioned here. The affectionately teasing perception of Mrs Swithin, ‘the old girl with a wisp of white hair flying, knobbed shoes as if she had claws corned like a canary’s, and black stockings wrinkled over the ankles’, seems to be a shared one, or at the very least shared between David and Jessica, who are explicitly named in the sentence. Whereas in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse free indirect discourse is used primarily to highlight the differences in people’s perceptions, both of each other and themselves, here it is used to render the easy camaraderie between this high-spirited gang. This is notably a very ordinary kind of intimacy—an everyday experience of shared perception and understanding that stands in contrast to the more visionary moments of communion in The Waves . This passage holds no great significance for the story of Between the Acts , but we see in this almost throwaway moment the possibility of a collective stream of consciousness reflecting ordinary moments of shared feeling and perceiving, which stand in counterbalance to the emphasis on isolation and dispersion elsewhere in the novel.

Of course, group feeling has its dangers, as Woolf was well aware. The Unanimists were optimistic about the possibility of a communal spirit animating a group, portraying it in ecstatic terms. But Woolf was also aware of works that painted a more pessimistic view, such as Wilfred Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1916), which she discussed with Leonard and with Roger Fry. 26 Trotter’s book, influenced by the work of the crowd psychologist, Gustave Le Bon, emphasized the irrationality of the masses and their susceptibility to influence and control. Woolf was pulled in two directions: at once drawn to the idea of communal feeling and perceiving as a way of bridging the divide between individual minds, and also wary of the violence that can result from the manipulation of the ‘herd instinct’. 27 We find evidence of this tension throughout her works, especially in The Waves , the novel concerned most overtly with group consciousness. In an influential essay, Jane Marcus reads the ending of the novel, with Bernard telling the story of the other characters’ lives, as a cautionary tale of a fascist and imperialist instinct, the domination of a single voice over a heteroglossic chorus. 28 And Jessica Berman has persuasively argued that The Waves is intricately bound up with the fantasies of community offered by the proto-fascist movement gathering in Britain in the early 1930s, whose power Woolf recognizes even as she also sees and critiques its limitations. 29 For my purposes here, it is significant that what is at stake in the conclusion of The Waves is not so much a group mind or a communal feeling so much as Bernard’s own feeling of being indistinct from his friends, manifest in his narration of their stories. Unlike The Waves , which cedes the last word to Bernard, in Between the Acts , the pendulum remains swinging between individual isolation and a sense of community, summed up in the repeated refrain of the gramophone, ‘dispersed are we; who have come together’ but also ‘let us retain whatever made that harmony’ ( BA 95). It is crucial that the moments of collective consciousness like the group perception of Mrs Swithin and the anonymous fragmented speech of the villagers concerns brief, intermittent flashes of fellow-feeling rather than the sustained resolution of multiple voices into a single one, as at the end of The Waves . Such flashes are arguably less prone to devolving from fellow-feeling into groupthink, even if Woolf, especially in her writing of the 1930s, never forgot this danger.

Psycho-analogies and the Feeling of Relations

We have just seen Woolf’s experiments in rendering collective perception, and in the final part of this chapter I want to turn to a still lesser-known technique that I propose belongs to the stylistic repertoire of stream-of-consciousness writing: the use of analogies, often extended, to represent thought and feeling. These analogies, which Woolf uses with particular frequency and agility, bring her together with William James, and it will show us another way of understanding the deep concern with relationality that underlies her stream-of-consciousness writing.

Although Dorrit Cohn identified what she called ‘psycho-analogies’ as a narrative mode of representing consciousness in Transparent Minds (1978) , critics have not subsequently recognized the use of comparative strategies as a feature of stream of consciousness writing. 30 And yet psycho-analogies are prevalent in modernist works. Citing examples from Proust, Nathalie Sarraute, and Robert Musil (of whom one scholarly count found an astonishing 337 similes in thirty-eight pages), Cohn calls Woolf ‘the stream-of-consciousness novelist who employs psycho-analogies most copiously’. 31 These often extended similes distend narrative time and underscore the contradictory nature of thoughts and feelings while bypassing ‘not only self-articulation, but also self-understanding’, since they are not part of the character’s own inner discourse. 32 Although they can be attributed either to a narrator or ‘infused more directly into the thought-stream of the character’, psycho-analogies are not accounts of what a character is thinking, and so serve a different purpose than the narration of inner speech that comprises interior monologue. 33 Their primary aim, we could say, is not so much to convey the content of a character’s thoughts, but rather the process of thinking. More precisely, psycho-analogies are used to describe in highly specific and evocative ways the feeling of thinking.

Woolf is an extremely adept practitioner of such analogies. Take these examples, from Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse :

But—but—why did she suddenly feel, for no reason that she could discover, desperately unhappy? As a person who has dropped some grain of pearl or diamond into the grass and parts the tall blades very carefully, this way and that, and searches here and there vainly, and at last spies it there at the roots, so she went through one thing and another … ( MD 120–1) What then was this terror, this hatred? Turning back among the many leaves which the past had folded in him, peering into the heart of that forest where light and shade so chequer each other that all shape is distorted, and one blunders, now with the sun in one’s eyes, now with a dark shadow, he sought an image to cool and detach and round off his feeling in a concrete shape. ( TL 185) 34

In the first example, Clarissa Dalloway rummages in her mind for the cause of an emotion, and in the second, James Ramsay attempts to identify a feeling by combing through his past. Incidentally, James’s search for ‘an image to cool and detach and round off his feeling in a concrete shape’ is an apt description of Woolf’s own process. Both analogies concern states of confusion, a sense of not quite knowing and then seeking to discover what one is thinking or feeling by turning over various memories and ideas. The ensuing images in the analogies—of someone searching for a dropped pearl in the grass, and of a person blundering in a forest blinded by chequered rays of light—aim to give a sense of how this state of mind feels. It is also characteristic of Woolf that these comparisons are dynamic—in both cases, the analogous image is not a static tableau but involves some active process. More than what is thought, felt, or sensed, these descriptions are concerned with conveying what it is like to think, which, for Woolf, is never separate from feeling and sensing.

The deployment of psycho-analogies brings Woolf, a preeminent writer of stream of consciousness, close to William James, a pioneer of this term in psychology. Recall that for James, the stream metaphor was intended to reorient us toward relations and to see these as being no less important as the terms they connected. Rather than a train with discrete albeit connected cars, James argues that our mind is closer to a continuously flowing stream. Every substantive thought is ineluctably inflected by myriad relations to what has preceded it and what will follow. ‘Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead.’ 35 For James, this free water with its dying echoes and dawning senses is crucially constitutive of the way consciousness feels, which we neglect in our blinkered view of thoughts as ‘ “about” this object or “about” that, the stolid word about engulfing all their delicate idiosyncrasies in its monotonous sound’. 36 If a thunderclap breaks into silence, for instance, ‘the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure , but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it … The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence; but the feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just gone.’ 37

It is this deeply relational aspect of consciousness, hazy and impossible to isolate though these relations may be, that Woolf’s writing is also particularly interested in conveying. Thus, her works tend to be highly associative, darting back and forth across time and space as one impression recalls another. In our focus on the ‘aboutness’ of thoughts, James observes, we have been misled by our use of language. ‘We ought to say a feeling of and , a feeling of if , a feeling of but , and a feeling of by , quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use.’ 38 Gertrude Stein’s radical experiments with prepositions is one inheritance of this Jamesian insight in literature, but we can also see it importantly, if less directly, in the work of Woolf. Her psycho-analogies are keyed especially to the relations between substantive thoughts, not only conveying particular thoughts about particular things but also evoking the ways in which one thought or memory is ineluctably inflected by other experiences and associations. This is reflected in the very form of the analogy itself, in which the ‘like’ or ‘just as’ or ‘as if’ reaches toward other terms and experiences, weaving an intricate web of relations.

We find a beautiful image for the feeling of relating in Mrs Dalloway , just after Peter Walsh leaves Clarissa after their first reunion. As he walks down Victoria Street, Peter hears the bell of St Margaret’s toll and experiences ‘an extraordinarily clear, yet puzzling, recollection of her, as if this bell had come into the room years ago, where they sat at some moment of great intimacy, and had gone from one to the other and had left, like a bee with honey, laden with the moment’ ( MD 49–50). The feeling at issue here is an uncanny sense of déjà vu, but unlike the Proustian involuntary memory, which collapses past and present time, the distance travelled between the two moments is here delicately preserved in the flight of the bee. If William James reminds us that when we hear a crash of thunder it is not the thunder alone but ‘thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it’, the flight of the bee is an analogy for all the variegated shades of relations that colour any experience.

Including such analogies in our account of stream of consciousness offers us a new view onto the genre. Of course, the juxtapositional energies of analogy can be put to any number of uses, including to shock, ironize, and play, all of which Woolf deploys at different moments. But one important use, evident in her analogies to describe the feeling of being conscious, is to highlight and to evoke the cognitive habit of relating itself. What Woolf conveys in these analogical descriptions of thinking, remembering, and searching through the mind is the feeling of ‘if’ and the feeling of ‘and’, the feeling of ‘like’ and the feeling of ‘as’. She highlights the propensity to make connections, and in this sense reading analogies solely for their content would be to take them only in their ‘aboutness’. What they equally illustrate in each case is the feeling of relationality itself.

Although Woolf, along with many of her modernist contemporaries, has often been accused of being overly preoccupied with individual minds, sometimes to the point of solipsism, we can in fact discern in the very textures of her stream of consciousness writing a deeply relational worldview that reaches out to other domains of experience, social, historical, and natural. ‘All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children’ ( E 3 422). We can look to thematic representations in her novels for an account of these shifting relations—perhaps best depicted in The Years , which follows several generations of the Pargiter family—but we can also look to the level of form itself. In her deft use of free indirect discourse to braid a common reality out of different perspectives, in her experiments with rendering collective perception, and in her analogical descriptions of the feeling of consciousness, Woolf shows us in different ways the ineluctably relational nature of consciousness.

Selected Bibliography

Banfield, Ann , The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000 ), 307–11.

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Berman, Jessica , ‘Of Waves and Opposition: The Waves , Oswald Mosley, and the New Party’, in Merry M. Pawlowski , ed., Virginia Woolf and Fascism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001 ), 105–21.

Cohn, Dorrit , Transparent Minds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978 ).

Gerould, Katharine Fullerton, ‘ Stream of Consciousness ’, The Saturday Review , 22 October 1927, 233–5, 223.

Hawkins, Ethel , ‘ The Stream of Consciousness Novel ’, The Atlantic Monthly , September 1926, 356–60.

James, William , Principles of Psychology , 2 vols (New York: Dover Books, 1950 ).

Long, Hoyt and Richard Jean So , ‘ Turbulent Flow: A Computational Model of World Literature ’, Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 3 ( 2016 ), 345–67.

Lukács, Georg , ‘The Ideology of Modernism’, in Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle , trans. John and Necke Mander (New York: Harper & Row, 1971 ), 17–46.

Mahaffey, Vicki , ‘Streams Beyond Consciousness’, in Jean-Michel Rabaté , ed., A Handbook of Modernism Studies (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2013 ), 35–54.

Marcus, Jane , ‘Britannia Rules The Waves ’, in Karen Lawrence , ed., Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century ‘British’ Literary Canons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992 ), 136–62.

McIntire, Gabrielle , ‘Heteroglossia, Monologism, and Fascism: Bernard Reads The Waves ’, Narrative 13, no. 1 ( 2005 ), 29–45.

McLaurin, Allen , ‘ Virginia Woolf and Unanimism ’, Journal of Modern Literature 9, no. 1 (1981–1982), 115–22.

Palmer, Alan , ‘Stream of Consciousness or Interior Monologue’, in David Herman , Manfred Jahn , and Marie-Laure Ryan , eds, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (London: Routledge, 2010 ), 570–1.

Pascal, Roy , The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Function in the Nineteenth Century European Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977 ).

Schwartz, Sanford , The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot and Twentieth Century Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985 ).

This confusion is noted in the entry title in at least one encyclopaedia. See Alan Palmer , ‘Stream of Consciousness or Interior Monologue’, in David Herman , Manfred Jahn , and Marie-Laure Ryan , eds, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (London: Routledge, 2010), 570–1 .

  Robert Humphrey makes a similar point in Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 5 . For more recent discussions see Hoyt Long and Richard Jean So , ‘Turbulent Flow: A Computational Model of World Literature’, Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2016), 345–67 ; Vicki Mahaffey , ‘Streams Beyond Consciousness’, in Jean-Michel Rabaté , ed., A Handbook of Modernist Studies (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 35–54 .

James himself came to it by way of the now largely forgotten British philosopher, Shadworth Hodgson, who first used the term in Time and Space: A Metaphysical Essay (London: Longman Green, 1865).

  William James , Principles of Psychology , 2 vols (New York: Dover Books, 1950), 1: 239 .

  May Sinclair , ‘The Novels of Dorothy Richardson’, The Egoist 5, no. 4 (1918), 58 .

  Ethel Hawkins , ‘The Stream of Consciousness Novel’, The Atlantic Monthly , September 1926, 356–60, esp. 358 .

The characteristic modern novelist, the influential critic J. Middleton Murry wrote, attempted ‘to record immediately the growth of a consciousness. Immediately, without any effort at mediation by means of an interposed plot or story.’ See Murry , Discoveries (London: W.W. Collins & Sons, 1924), 98 .

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould , ‘Stream of Consciousness’, The Saturday Review , 22 October 1927, 233–5, 223 .

  Gerould, ‘Stream of Consciousness’ , 234; D. H. Lawrence , Selected Literary Criticism , ed. Anthony Beal (New York: Viking Books, 1956), 114 .

On this hard/soft divide as one of the oppositions of modernism see Sanford Schwartz , The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot and Twentieth Century Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) .

So where Robert Humphrey sees Richardson as having moments of brilliance but finally becoming ‘lost in the overflow—a formless, unending deluge of realistic details’ (9), he writes of Joyce: ‘What the ends of Ulysses finally are, I do not expect to determine,’ suggesting that the failing of incomprehension lies with the critic, not the author. See Jesse Matz , Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 83–4 for a discussion of the different critical treatments of male and female modernist writers.

On the gendered history of the devaluation of the detail, see Naomi Schor , Reading in Detail (New York: Routledge, 2007) .

  Dorothy M. Richardson , ‘Foreword’, Pilgrimage , 4 vols (London: Virago, 1979), 1: 9–10. In her Atlantic article, Hawkins also singles out ‘three brilliant women writers’ (Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, and Woolf) as key practitioners of the method, ‘interesting for their individuality in likeness’ ( ‘Stream of Consciousness’, 356 ).

  Richardson, ‘Foreword’ , 1: 12.

For a recent argument about the politics of Woolf’s overturning of aesthetic hierarchies, see Jacques Rancière , The Lost Thread: The Democracy of Modern Fiction , trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury, 2016) .

For the earliest formulation of this idea, see Georg Lukács , ‘The Ideology of Modernism’, in Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle , trans. John and Necke Mander (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 17–46 . For responses to Lukács and a robust debate on the politics of modernism and expressionism, see Ernst Bloch et al, eds, Aesthetics and Politics (New York: Verso Books, 2007) .

  Nancy Armstrong , Desire and Domestic Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 247 .

  Sinclair, ‘Future of the Novel’, Pall Mall Gazette , 10 January 1921 .

  Sinclair, ‘Future of the Novel’ . Also cited in Mahaffey, 45.

Édouard Dujardin, The Bays are Sere , 16; Les lauriers sont coupés (Paris: Librarie de la Revue Indépendante, 1888), 30 .

See Roy Pascal , The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Function in the Nineteenth Century European Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977) .

Ann Banfield gives a thorough linguistic account of free indirect discourse in Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (Boston: Routledge, 1982) . For an accessible explanation aimed at the general reader, see James Wood , How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008) . For an argument about its ideological functions, see D. A. Miller , The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) .

For more on this point, see Ann Banfield , The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000) .

See Allen McLaurin , ‘Virginia Woolf and Unanimism’, Journal of Modern Literature 9, no. 1 (1981–2), 115–22 ; and ‘Consciousness and Group Consciousness in Virginia Woolf’, in Eric Warner , ed., Virginia Woolf: a Centenary Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), 28–40 . In the latter piece McLaurin also notes that the association of stream of consciousness with individual minds has obscured Woolf’s interest in a group mind ( ‘Group Consciousness’, 29–30 ). For more on this movement, see Felix J. Walter , ‘Unanimism and the Novels of Jules Romains’, PMLA 51, no. 3 (1936), 863–71 .

The novel, Les Copains , was translated into English by Sydney Waterlow and Desmond MacCarthy, the latter of whom was the model for Bernard in The Waves ( McLaurin, ‘Group Consciousness’ , 34).

See McLaurin, ‘Group Consciousness’ , 36–7.

In her diary she writes: ‘Old Roger [Fry] takes a gloomy view, not of our life, but of the world’s future; but I think I detected the influence of Trotter & the herd, & so I distrusted him. Still, stepping out into Charlotte Street, where the Bloomsbury murder took place a week or two ago, & seeing a crowd swarming in the road & hearing women abuse each other & at the noise others come running with delight—all this sordidity made me think him rather likely to be right’ ( D 1 80, cited in McLaurin, ‘Group Consciousness’ , 37).

See Jane Marcus , ‘Britannia Rules the Waves,’ in Karen Lawrence , ed., Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century ‘British’ Literary Canons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 136–62 ; and Gabrielle McIntire , ‘Heteroglossia, Monologism, and Fascism: Bernard Reads The Waves ’, Narrative 13, no. 1 (2005), 29–45 .

  Jessica Berman , ‘Of Waves and Opposition: The Waves , Oswald Mosley, and the New Party’, in Merry M. Pawlowski , ed., Virginia Woolf and Fascism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 105–21 .

For instance, Humphrey cites as the basic stream of consciousness techniques only ‘direct interior monologue, indirect interior monologue, omniscient description, and soliloquy’ (23). It is also missing from the long list of techniques given by Hoyt Long and Richard Jean So in their recent computational study of stream of consciousness ( ‘Turbulent Flow’, 346 ).

  Dorrit Cohn , Transparent Minds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 44 . In fact Cohn finds a ‘hypertrophy of analogies’ in modernist fiction (43).

  Cohn, Transparent Minds , 42.

These examples are also cited by Cohn in Transparent Minds , 44 .

  James, Principles of Psychology , 1: 255.

  James, Principles of Psychology , 1: 246.

  James, Principles of Psychology , 1: 240–1.

  James, Principles of Psychology , 1: 245–6.

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Stream of Consciousness Journaling: A Beginner’s Guide

Everyone seems to be suffering from a cluttered and unorganized mind these days. Whether you’re stressed about work or have financial struggles weighing you down, it can seem like a challenge to sort through your thoughts on any given day.

But you don’t need to let your mind rule you anymore.

There are many ways to find a healthy outlet for your thoughts, whether you choose to let them out in conversation, in therapy or in a journal.

Journaling is one of the most effective ways to  express your innermost thoughts and feelings  and find a sense of mental clarity. Because some people balk at the idea of maintaining a daily writing habit, many opt for an enjoyable alternative known as stream of consciousness journaling.

What is Stream of Consciousness Journaling?

Stream of consciousness journaling is a simple exercise that requires nothing more than a pen and blank sheet of paper or journal. No prompts or guides needed. As you write, pay no attention to structure, tone or grammar. Simply let your thoughts flow freely onto the page.

You can journal about areas you want to improve , about your day, thoughts you’ve had, things you’re struggling with, dreams for your future – you can write about literally anything that’s on your mind.

But we would encourage just that – writing about what’s on your mind. There’s no need to conjure up anything that’s not already there. Don’t pressure yourself to write on x or to sound like y. Just write. Just journal.

The Leuchtturm1917 has almost a cult following – and for good reason Their journals are high quality, well designed – and contain more pages than most others. Page numbers and a table of contents help you organized. Its paper is a little thinner than other notebooks (80gsm), but its high enough quality to prevent bleed through.

• 80 GSM Paper Weight
• 251 Numbered Pages
• A Sheet of Labels

Some Other Journals We Love for Stream of Consciousness

You need a great journal if you’re going to dive into stream of consciousness journaling. Sure you could just use some blank paper, but you should make it enjoyable with a journal you look forward to opening each day.

If you don’t have a good blank journal to get started, feel free to use a sheet of paper, or check out some of these great lined journals:

• Lemome Corked Eco Friendly Journal (I’m using this one currently – it’s a great deal at $13)
• Jumping Fox Design Journal ($15)
• Poluma Journal ($8)

Or check out our list of best blank, lined journals .

Before we dive in further, let’s look at some benefits of stream of consciousness journaling.

Benefits of Stream of Consciousness Journaling

Stream of consciousness journaling has a number of key benefits for your mental health and overall well-being. Here are some of the most meaningful advantages that you can discover when you take up this pastime.

A Clearer Mind

In today’s fast-paced society, it can be challenging to find a moment to slow down and calm your mind. Stream of consciousness journaling gives you the opportunity to take some time to yourself and sort through your thoughts.

Whether you decide to journal first thing in the morning or right before you go to bed, forming this habit is one of the simplest ways to get your worries out of your head and directly onto paper. The result is a clearer mind that lets you feel more centered.

Mindfulness

If you keep up with health and wellness trends, you’ve likely heard of this popular buzzword. Mindfulness refers to the act of focusing your awareness on the present and accepting it the way it is. This includes all of the thoughts, feelings and sensations that you might be experiencing in that moment.

For many people, mindfulness serves as a therapeutic technique that allows them to achieve a sense of inner peace.

Stream of consciousness journaling gives you the unique opportunity to become more in tune with the thoughts and feelings inside of you. By unleashing these sensations onto paper, you’ll achieve a greater sense of appreciation for the various emotions you’re experiencing here and now.

When your mind is cluttered with deadlines and worries, it’s hard to sort through the mess and isolate the good ideas you know you have. By writing freely in your journal, you can clear out all the noise in your mind and focus solely on the information you need.

Oh and by the way, if you’re a guy looking for a great journal, check out our list of the j .

Not only does journaling help you single out the creative ideas that you already have, but it also paves the way for new, original thoughts that you never knew were inside of you.

Better Decision Making

When you try to make an important decision just by thinking it through, you might find it hard to focus clearly on the information you need. That’s why writing out your thought process as you go along is one of the best ways to arrive at the decision that’s right for you.

When you see the  pros and cons  of each option clearly spelled out in front of you, you’ll have a clearer idea of what the best course of action is.

How Do You Write a Stream of Consciousness?

• Set the scene
• Take some deep breaths
• Allow your thoughts to come and go
• Hang onto the ideas that stick
• Allow for changes of thought

Developing a stream of consciousness journaling habit is easier than you think. Writing a stream of consciousness can be done by following these six steps.

Set the Scene

Find a quiet place that allows you to focus solely on the task at hand. Ideally, this should be a spot without any distractions or interruptions.

Take Some Deep Breaths

To get the most out of stream of consciousness journaling, it’s important to put yourself in the right frame of mind. Take a few deep breaths and calm yourself down before you begin to write.

Allow Your Thoughts Come and Go

You should never pressure yourself to come up with good ideas for your journal. Remember, the goal of stream of consciousness journaling is to let your thoughts flow freely. Accept your thoughts as they come and don’t be afraid to write them down in their pure, unfiltered state.

Hang Onto the Ideas That Stick

Every now and then, you’ll come to a conclusion in your writing that helps you see things more clearly. When this happens, be sure to hold onto that journal entry. You never know when you’ll need to refer to it again at some point in the future.

Stream of consciousness journaling is not meant to be rushed. Achieving a sense of mindfulness and forming a stronger relationship with yourself is a process that takes time and patience. Don’t worry if you don’t see the results you want right away.

Allow for Jumps and Changes of Thought

The beauty of freely writing your thoughts down is that there are no rules. You don’t have to worry about following a specific type of structure while you journal. That said, if you find yourself jumping from one thought to another while writing, embrace it instead of limiting yourself to a single idea. This will ultimately make you more likely to discover new things about yourself.

Getting the Most Out of Stream of Consciousness Journaling

Writing your stream of consciousness is a unique way to become more acquainted with yourself and the way your mind works. By taking a little bit of time every day to journal, you’ll have the opportunity to form a stronger relationship with yourself and gain more clarity in your everyday life.

If nothing else, and you feel you have a cluttered mind, give it a shot for  7 days. Just 7 days. See how you feel after a week. If you’ve noticed improved mindfulness, peace of mind, and a stronger relationship with yourself, keep it up.

If not, no worries, ditch it. Maybe you’re better suited for a guided journal or a gratitude journal with daily prompts.

Either way, best of luck on your journey!

Brooks Manley

Creative Primer  is a resource on all things journaling, creativity, and productivity. We’ll help you produce better ideas, get more done, and live a more effective life.

My name is Brooks. I do a ton of journaling, like to think I’m a creative (jury’s out), and spend a lot of time thinking about productivity. I hope these resources and product recommendations serve you well. Reach out if you ever want to chat or let me know about a journal I need to check out!

Here’s my favorite journal for 2024: 

Gratitude Journal Prompts Mindfulness Journal Prompts Journal Prompts for Anxiety Reflective Journal Prompts Healing Journal Prompts Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Journal Prompts Mental Health Journal Prompts ASMR Journal Prompts Manifestation Journal Prompts Self-Care Journal Prompts Morning Journal Prompts Evening Journal Prompts Self-Improvement Journal Prompts Creative Writing Journal Prompts Dream Journal Prompts Relationship Journal Prompts "What If" Journal Prompts New Year Journal Prompts Shadow Work Journal Prompts Journal Prompts for Overcoming Fear Journal Prompts for Dealing with Loss Journal Prompts for Discerning and Decision Making Travel Journal Prompts Fun Journal Prompts

7 Types of Journaling and How to Pick the Best Style for You

You may also like, how to journal daily: making journaling a habit.

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How to Use Stream of Consciousness Writing

The stream of consciousness writing style is an intense and unique type of creative expression that has been used by some of the most iconic authors throughout history.

It’s a free flow-like approach to writing that uses the interior monologue and feelings of a character (or a narrator relating the character’s thoughts) in a way that allows the reader to develop a sense of their mental state.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss what stream of consciousness writing is, what it takes to achieve it, as well as the 7 foundational elements you need to learn before attempting stream of consciousness writing yourself.

We’ll close with mentions from famous authors who have used this literary device to great effect in their books.

What Is Stream of Consciousness Writing?

Stream of consciousness writing is a type of prose that attempts to capture the flow of thoughts and feelings in your character’s mind. It relies on an open, creative state of flow rather than on strict narrative technique.

Stream of consciousness writing can be compared to free-writing, stream-of-thought journaling, and speaking out loud as it allows you to explore the thoughts and emotions of your characters without having to focus on grammar, punctuation, or structure.

Why Is Stream of Consciousness Called That Way?

The term “stream of consciousness” originates from philosopher William James in his 1893 work, “Principles of Psychology.”

He described stream of consciousness as “the stream of thought or inner dialogue that’s ongoing in any person’s mind during conscious experience”.

This type of writing has been popularized by authors such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, who both incorporated stream-of-consciousness writing into their works in an attempt to convey the organic process of thought within a character’s mind.

Is Stream of Consciousness Writing Hard to Do?

Stream of consciousness writing can be difficult, especially for those writers who are new to this style of creative expression. It requires discipline and focus, coupled with the ability to let go of any pre-established narrative plan.

Additionally, stream of consciousness writing, often considered stream of subconscious writing, requires you to tap into the raw emotions of your characters while purposely breaking the rules of narrative structure, which is not a natural process for most writers.

What Are the 7 Key Elements of Stream of Consciousness Writing?

Having said that, it you’re willing to give it an honest try, here are the seven elements of stream of consciousness writing that will give you a strong foundation for you to build on:

1. Make your characters speak in a stream-like fashion

Stream of consciousness writing should be done in an uninterrupted flow, rather than relying on traditional punctuation or sentence structure. For this type of writing, you don’t want to engage your critical thinking brain. Just get transported into the subconscious mind of your characters and type away!

2. Use concrete language

Rather than using abstract concepts or ideas, stream of consciousness writers should strive to use concrete language that accurately conveys their characters’ true feelings and experiences without losing its intensity.

For example, if you’re writing about a feeling of joy, it would be better to use words like ‘euphoric’ or ‘blissful’ instead of ‘happy’ or ‘content’”.

3. Focus on the present moment

Stream of consciousness writing requires that you feel what it is for your characters to live in the moment so you can take note of all their thoughts, feelings, and sensations.

The idea of the present moment implies abandoning your character’s attachment to past and future, focusing exclusively on the “now.”

4. Use stream-of-thought techniques

Stream of consciousness writers should use stream-of-thought techniques such as free-writing or stream-of-thought journaling to capture your raw thoughts on paper without stopping every few minutes to critique your writing.

The goal here is to achieve a state of “flow” where you can no longer assess the passage of time as you write — it’s like you look at your watch during a pause and two hours have gone by in what feels like 10 or 15 minutes.

5. Don’t overthink

Stream of consciousness writing is not a perfect science and can sometimes veer off topic or lose its focus. It’s important to not let yourself get caught up in too much analysis and simply let your writing flow naturally — so, no self-editing allowed!

6. Embrace chaos

Stream of consciousness writing is, in a way, full of chaos and disorganization and you have to be okay with that. This type of prose allows you to explore and express internal thoughts and emotions that would just not be possible if grounded on structure and rules.

7. Allow yourself to be vulnerable

Stream of consciousness writing forces you to confront your innermost feelings, fears, and doubts as a writer and by extension that of your characters.

As a form of self-exploration, it’s important to embrace this vulnerability and be unafraid to keep your guard down during this exercise.

Which Famous Writers Have Used the Stream of Consciousness Technique In Their Works?

Famous authors who have utilized stream of consciousness technique in their works include:

James Joyce, whose novel Ulysses is often considered one of the most famous stream of consciousness works.

Virginia Woolf, whose novel Mrs. Dalloway explores inner thoughts and feelings in moving detail.

William Faulkner, who used stream of consciousness to capture the experiences of a Southern family in his book, As I Lay Dying.

Ernest Hemingway also wrote stream-of-consciousness style works such as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms.

Dorothy Richardson, who was one of the pioneers of stream-of-consciousness technique in many of her works, such as Pilgrimage and Pointed Roofs.

Marcel Proust , whose stream of consciousness work Remembrance of Things Past is considered a classic of modernist literature.

In Conclusion

Stream of consciousness writing is a powerful literary technique that allows writers to tap into their subconscious thought process and explore their innermost feelings, fears, and emotions without being constrained by structure and writing rules.

With practice and dedication, stream of consciousness prose can become a valuable tool in your writer’s arsenal for unlocking your creative potential.

If you’re looking to get started with this writing technique, it’s important to remember that while it may flout rules of grammar and punctuation that doesn’t mean your writing will become substandard. If done well, the opposite is true.

Also, while stream of consciousness writing doesn’t require you to adhere to specific rules, it does require a lot of discipline and focus so you can stay tuned to the present moment as you write without being distracted by thoughts from the past or anticipation for the future.

Good luck and happy stream of conscious writing!

Harry  Wallett  is the Founder and Managing Director of Relay Publishing. Combining his entrepreneurial background with a love of great stories,  Harry  founded Relay in 2013 as a fresh way to create books and for writers to earn a living from their work. Since then, Relay has sold 3+ million copies and worked with 100s of writers on bestselling titles such as  Defending Innocence ,  The Alveria Dragon Akademy Series  and  Rancher’s Family Christmas .

Harry oversees the creative direction of the company, and works to develop a supportive collaborative environment for the Relay team to thrive within in order to fulfill our mission to create unputdownable books.

Relay Publishing wants you

If you think you have what it takes to become a brilliant writer, editor, or storyliner, Relay Publishing has a range of exciting opportunities .

Find out more about us , and get in touch .

We can’t wait to hear from you!

6 Mindfulness Writing Exercises From A Meditation Instructor

What's In This Article: ☰

According to Ruth Ozeki [author and Zen Buddhist priest], there is a direct relationship between writing and mindfulness.

Both techniques are therapeutic. The meditative exercise of mindfulness has been scientifically proven to help with everything from stress to anxiety to blood pressure. And, thanks to luminaries like Thich Nhat Hanh and Jon Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness has become incredibly popular of late.

On the writing side, we have things like poetry therapy, mindful journaling, and of course writing therapy, which was devised by James W. Pennebaker in the late 1980s, which research shows yields significant benefits.

So both practices seem to walk hand and hand. And because of this, they make a perfect couple. Try some of the exercises that I have shared below, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

6 Mindfulness Writing Techniques

Y ou might also like to read my article How To Improve Your Imagination.

1: Mindful Writing Prompts

The basic idea is to take a prompt and write about it. With that in mind, here are ten of the best mindful writing prompts. 

 “This is my story…”

Imagine that your life is a story. What story have you been living lately? Write your personal story in 2000 words. 

“My mind is full of…” 

Mindfulness is about self-awareness. It’s about understanding what is happening in your own mind. Because, as Vipassana meditation master S. N Goenka explains, it is a lot easier to control the mind if you are aware of it. 

In 1000 words, write down the thoughts and feelings that have been occupying your mind. This will help you to release them.

“For the rest of the day, my goal is…” 

This is a simple and short prompt. Simply write down your goal and how you will achieve it by the end of the day. 

“I am grateful for…” 

Gratitude is one of the 24 character strengths in Positive Psychology. According to Positive Psychology founder Marting Seligman, gratitude helps us to be happy. Plus, it bolsters our mental health. Write a list of 100 things you are grateful for. 

“This is the most relaxing scene I can imagine…”  

One of the best exercises is to combine mindfulness with visualization. Specifically, write a 1000-word description of the most relaxing scene you can imagine. 

Describe your garden

The best place to practise meditative writing is in the garden. Sit in your garden and write a 1000-word description of it. 

“My body feels like this…”

Have you heard about Body Scan meditation? It is a meditation created by Jon Kabat Zinn as part of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Course. In it, we progressively observe sensations in the body.

Let’s turn this into a mindful writing exercise. Simply write what you feel in your body, going from your head to your toes.

2: Stream-of-consciousness 

When starting meditation, writers should spend at least ten minutes letting go of thoughts. Stream-of-consciousness writing can help.

“Stream of Consciousness” is a term coined by American philosopher and psychologist William James, whom you might know as the brother of the novelist Henry James. In the book “The Principles of Psychology”, James explains that stream-of-consciousness is spontaneous writing that gives you an opportunity to release thoughts onto paper. 

To do this:

• Begin writing your thoughts. Whatever you think, you write.

Remember, the key is not to judge. Instead, let your writing flow freely.

This is a wonderful form of writing therapy. By transcribing your mind onto paper, you gain an all-new perspective on your thoughts and feelings. You will inevitably notice that much of your stress and anxiety is based on illogical thoughts. By seeing those thoughts in ink, you will immediately recognise the delusional nature of the mind. This will help you to overcome negative thoughts and difficult emotions. 

3: Beauty  

Psychologists have proven that the ability to appreciate beauty is vital to happiness (*1). Indeed, the Appreciation of Beauty is one of the “Character Strengths” defined in Positive Psychology. 

One way to appreciate beauty is to describe it in writing.

Here’s how:

• Get a pen and paper
• Sit somewhere relaxing and beautiful
• Take ten mindful breaths
• Notice anything around you that is beautiful
• Begin to write a realistic description of it. Perhaps there’s a beautiful flower with vibrant colours. If so, describe the colours. Maybe it’s a sound, like birdsong. If so, describe the tonality and melody.
• Move on to another beautiful thing
• Write a minimum of 1000 words

4: Self Awareness 

One essential novel-writing skill is the ability to describe emotions accurately. Usually, we write about the emotions of our characters. But to improve this skill, we can mindfully write about our own emotions. 

This is a type of  mindfulness meditation . And not only will it improve your writing, but it will also strengthen your mind. 

• Sit somewhere quiet and relaxing
• Observe the feelings and emotions in your mind
• Begin to write about those emotions by describing them mindfully.
• Your emotions will change while you write. Follow your emotions. As they change, write about how they are changing.

This does two things:

• It makes us more aware of our emotions, which improves emotional regulation
• It improves our ability to write about a character’s feelings and motivations.

5: Creative writing exercise  

We must be mindful of our physical form. Indeed, “mindfulness of physical feelings” is one of the “Foundations of Mindfulness” in Buddhism.

We want to have a non-judgmental view of the body. And we can achieve this in a weird way. That is, by imagining that we are a character in a story.

To do this, we describe ourselves objectively in a non-judgemental fashion. This improves self-awareness. Plus, as a bonus, by describing ourselves objectively, we learn to write more detailed and more realistic characters.

6: Transcribe the mind

This is similar to stream-of-consciousness writing but with some crucial differences.

The gist of it is to transcribe whatever runs through your mind. Not only do we write our thoughts, but we also write the quality of the thoughts, the loudness, the feelings, everything.

There are many ways to go about this. Feel free to experiment. Or try the following:

• Change the colours of the writing (for instance, if it’s an angry thought make it red)
• Use different letter sizes to express loudness
• Experiment with different fonts.

The result of this process will look something like a piece of modern art, an artistic expression of the mind. And the process of creating it won’t just increase mindfulness but will illustrate the mind in a way most people have never seen.

Writing mindfully each day can increase our self-awareness, help us to put our thoughts on paper, and improve emotional wellbeing. In fact it could even improve relationships, especially if you practice expressive writing according to Greater Good.

It also helps with self-development. For instance, writing down goals helps to make them more tangible. And journaling offers a way to chart our progress. I find that just by writing my emotions on paper I accept them, which is a key part of both mindfulness and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). 

There is little research specifically on mindful writing. However, research has uncovered significant benefits of journaling. And theoretically, mindful writing should have similar benefits, if not even better ones.

James Pennebaker at the University of Texas, Austin, states that journaling strengthens T-lymphocytes immune cells [which is backed by further research (Murray, 2002).] and helps with stressful events [backed by Baikie & Wilhelm, 2005].

But I recommend that you simply try it. See what benefits you yourself get from it. 

  Best Mindfulness Meditation Exercises ] 

  Meditation For Creativity

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Paul Harrison BSc is a qualified meditation teacher who believes in genuine, authentic meditation. He has more than 15 years experience in teaching meditation and mindfulness both to individuals and to corporations.

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