Superglue, Virginia Woolf, and Rejecting the Internal Editor
An exercise in both restraint and free-fall. It was… interesting.
I’ve always been skeptical of stream-of-consciousness writing. Part of that has to do with my dislike of such novels as To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, which I was forced to read in high school and loathed to the bitter end. I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of Virginia Woolf, but I wouldn’t invite her to a dinner party.
Yet when I read Linda Caroll’s piece on the pitfalls of stream-of-consciousness writing, married with the prompt from Rick Lewis to write for 15 minutes and then publish without editing, I couldn’t help but be intrigued.
See, it’s not stream-of-consciousness itself that bothers me. In fact, I’m drawn to this style myself. It’s reading the finished product that bugs me no end. I like to write my own thoughts as they come to me, without sticking to an outline — but I succumb to my internal editor as I go. I think that’s part of why I have such trouble with getting a first draft onto paper. It’s hard to just let anything flow without working to fix it along the way.
That’s why I took this challenge to write for 15 minutes and see where it takes me. I’d like to say I sat down right away and wrote immediately, but the truth is that I read Linda’s…
