Fragmentary Thoughts and Feelings

Back for a moment to stream of consciousness and spontaneous prose. The forms respond to social and historical change. So Joyce who would be considered a Modernist employs techniques such as interior monologue. The writing is characterized by associative, and sometimes dissociative, leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose apparently difficult to follow. The point is of course that this reflects the character's fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings.

Big intake of breath!

Now Dead Beat knows a lot of you knows this already. He also knows that you know Sigmund Freud and psychoanalytic thought had a great influence here. And Joyce was not the first. Indeed some would say Ovid employed a stream of consciousness technique and where was old Siggy then?

Anyways, I don't think that we should deliberately look around us and try to construct a new form, but we do need to be aware of the events occurring in our world. If we absorb them within, they can influence our writing in a relevant and important way.

Writing is not just about the act of writing. Too many writers, it seems, forget this - they write too much for the market or for egotistical return.

Forget the book signings, the autographs, the advances, the Oprah shananigans. Sit down at your desk and get a quill and ink. Dip it in and stain the page with caution and care.