Streamflow...of consciousness

I just wrote a vignette about staring at a wall and it kept drifting off to a stream of consciousness mode...so I thought that we really should have a thread that encourages that very thing.

If you are unfamiliar with stream of consciousness writing, it's essentially, and simply, just writing whatever comes into your head. It can be very meditative.

This is very much an exercise that can help us get out of our own way. It's a low threat reason for writing so it doesn't raise the alarm of our internal censor. "After all," we say to ourselves carelessly (and loud enough for our internal censor to overhear), "it's just a whatever crazy stuff comes into our head...it's not like we're trying to write anything serious."

Now, shhh, listen, but don't let the censor hear this: It does a world of good. I makes ideas and words flow, and it is a practice of the art of expression in one of it's purist forms.

So, let's not worry about anything but writing down the words as they come. Don't slow down, or stop, or correct. Don't worry about spelling, or punctuation (indeed, the best punctuation mark in this writing is what's called the "elipsis," the three little dots that roughly mean "nothing here, more to follow." Don't worry about writing anything except keeping the flow going.

If the words in your mind get ahead of your fingers, don't worry about it, just pick up wherever you are and go.

Oh, and if you're not sure how to begin, begin with "now I'm going to write about..." and put whatever comes next, it may not make sense, it may be a single word repeated, that's fine...just keep it going. (you can see some examples of a particular kind of stream of conscious writing called "automatic writing" in my some of my journal entries.