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The December exercise is to consider the interior of our characters. How do they think? What goes through their minds in the middle of a sene?
The Form of the Exercise –
We're going to provide a stream-of-consciousness from you POV character. It'll be about 3 to 4 minutes worth of time.
1) Your stream-of-consciousness will occur within a scene from the WIP.
So, first thing, post enough of the WIP scene to provide context. In color or italics, highlight the part of the scene where the s-o-c takes place.
2) Skip down a number of lines and post the final, edited form of the stream-of-consciousness.
The stream-of-consciousness of your character is just that ... what passes through her mind in these few minutes of the story. What does she think and feel.
By necessity, this stream of thought will be disconnected, discursive and nearly unintelligible. This is good.
Do not over-edit. Don't clean it up. Show us all the thoughts in as close to raw and original form as possible.
Length of the Exercise – Try to present the stream-of-consciousness snippet in 300 to 500 words. The excerpt from the WIP can be longer.
Comment on the exercise could address
The depth and detail of the stream of consciousness.
How well the s-o-c represents how humans think.
How this particular s-o-c fits into the WIP scene.
General consideration of how the stream-of-consciousness could be used to enrich the ongoing story.
FAQ
I don't have a WIP. What should I do? – Create a scene that might someday go into a WIP and use that.
Wait ... Does the stream-of-consciousness include about what's going on around the character? The dialog? The action? – Not really. It is what the character is thinking.
But she's thinking about the dialog, the action, what's happening outside the window .. – Mention what's actually going on only as a very secondary aspect.
If your character is watching a beheading I am less interested in
'the sunlight glinted off the polished steel of the upraised ax'
than I am in her thoughts ...
'...that looks heavy I wonder how somebody trains to be a headchopper does he go home and talk to his wife about his day and how does she get the blood out of his clothes anyway ... '
Can I have the character stream-of-conscious about something that happened a long time ago? A flashback? – Let's not. OK? Unless you really really have to.
Do I have to stick to this 'three to four minute' guidance? Why not ten minutes? I can't write 400 words about what the character thinks in three minutes. – Yes you can.
Does this exercise want just thoughts ... or do I include sensations as well? – Thoughts about sensations are fine. '.. my nose itches. I wish I weren't so tired. He's stepping on my bloody foot ...' and so on are very proper to the s-o-c.
This is going to be in First Person, right? – Right.
I am utterly incapable of posting something without proper sentence structure and grammar and good punctuation. Can I fix this stream-of-consciousness up till it's readable? – Do not write this as if it were story. Fix it only enough to be comprehensible. Then, if you can ... stop.
The exercise is intended to be in even-before-first-rough-draft writing.
We need to see the thoughts as they actually come to the mind, before the corners are smoothed off and the holes are filled in. The more disorganized and ungrammatical the exercise, the more authentic it is.
What I've got looks really stupid. I can write better than this. – This is not an exercise on how well you write. This is an exercise on how well you can 'hear' your character think. This is an exercise on the process of the mind. This is raw, unprocessed material. We need to see it in its original state.
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