Stream of Consciousness

My Personal Experience With Stream of Consciousness
I’d like to start of by saying that stream of consciousness was a writing technique taught in my high school writing course. The stream of consciousness was used in the first step of a 3 part process. First you wrote furiously whatever came into your mind without worrying about periods and then in the second and third steps you would employ an editing and re-writing process, much like a sculptor chipping away at a block of stone that will eventually result in the finished product.

What is Stream of Consciousness?
Stream of consciousness is when the narrative takes the form of an interior monologue about the characters thoughts. It also disregards syntax and punctuation. It is spontaneous and informal, but how spontaneous and supposedly unintentional it may actually be is subject to debate, in other words the complaint about it is it usually ends up that this style writers may strive to achieve intentionally, with purpose and then made to look like it is off the cuff.

My Favourite Author Jack Kerouac

List of Jack Kerouac’s books containing elements of stream of consciousness: On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans.

Jack Kerouac was called the Father of the Beat Generation, this was the generation that preceded the hippie generation of the 60’s. The Beat Generation was defined by listening to Jazz and Bebop music. Jack Kerouac’s writing method used the breathing technique of Jazz musicians where words were improvised in a long monologue without using the period but separated by the dash where the phrases between the dashes resembled improvisational jazz licks and took on a rhythm that was all their own. Here is Jack Kerouac from the beginning of Woody Allen’s movie Manhattan as an example- http://tiny.cc/RU7OL. As a bit of trivia, Woody Allen is a big Jazz fan and plays clarinet in a New Orleans style jazz band, tickets can be bought under the name of Woody Allen And His New Orleans Jazz Band.

Authors Inspired by Kerouac: Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Robbins, Lester Bangs, Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey, Haruki Murakami also an author who has a style similar to Jack Kerouac is David Sedaris.

An example of Jack Kerouac’s stream of consciousness style: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh..."
—from On the Road

Jack Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose Method: Belief and Technique for Modern Prose a List of Thirty Essentials
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven