My Self-Publishing Journey
Join me as I navigate the world of self-publishing from beginning to end, idea to published work.
So I remembered yesterday that I was supposed to post a writing prompt for the week, but I only remembered in passing for about a second or two and then my brain was off on other things. So my apologies for not getting this up yesterday. For this weeks writing prompt I want you to get into your character's head. Choose a character that you are either struggling understanding what they are thinking or how they are feeling and write from that characters PoV in stream of consciousness. If you don't know what stream of consciousness is defined with examples here: http://literarydevices.net/stream-of-consciousness/. The examples on that site are not exactly what I think of when I think of stream of consciousness but you can get the gist. Basically stream of consciousness is when you are writing down the thoughts that are going through a character's head. For example, my character Adam is a ten year old boy, so I should be writing in the voice of a ten year old boy and I should be portraying his thoughts through interior monologue (a synonym for stream of consciousness almost). So here goes: Crap! Home from the bar again. I hate when he stops at the bar. He always comes home mad. Why can't he just get drunk alone, here, where he only gets sad. He's not going to like my grade on my math test. I'll just slide it under that other paper there and hope he doesn't notice. Another beer? Time to leave. He won't stay in the living room long, he'll need another beer. I wish mom were here. If mom were here this wouldn't happen. And I would have a snack bag after school. It's a little cold out here, maybe a blanket...that's better.
---------------------- You can see how we don't get any action, we don't see Adam moving around doing things, because he can't see himself. He is thinking in his head and we are reading his unfiltered thoughts. You can play around with stream of consciousness in a few different ways too. Usually human beings don't think in full sentences so you could have something like: Homework then snacks oh feed dog stupid math... We don't think in full sentences, we aren't usually grammatically correct and you can portray that to extremes in stream of consciousness. This will be a useful exercise for me, because I'm noticing in things I've written in the past and things I'm writing now, people are not understanding what my characters are thinking. I write with very little interiority. So if I stick myself so deeply inside my characters head I'll be able to better extract voice and then add more of their thoughts into my stories. If you find yourself having the same problem as me this is the exercise for you. I'd love to see how your attempt at stream of consciousness turns out so if you try it out, post some of it in the comments below. Keep on Creating, K. A. Jairl
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K. A. JairlMy name is Kim and I'm glad you stopped by. This is where I post my triumphs and my downfalls as I fight the good fight of being a writer mom everyday. Archives
March 2019
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