Excerpt on Stream of Consciousness Writing from Third Period English

Today’s lesson is designed to open our minds and fuel our creativity. Writing in stream of consciousness is the fastest way to get your ideas down on paper.  It’s an unstructured, loose literary tool with only one rule: write what’s on your mind. And for our lesson, we’ll all follow these 5 precise steps to properly structure our stream of consciousness assignments.

1. Choose a topic. Any topic. Whatever pops into your head.
2. Write that topic down on a piece of paper.
3. I guess you should have had a piece of paper already. And a pen.
4. My favorite kind of pen is a ballpoint pen, which is strange because balls don’t have points, by definition.
5. Take your topic and write three to five of the first words you can think of to describe that topic.
6. Sorry there are more than five steps since I forgot the pen and paper thing earlier.
7. Step six was more of a thought than a step. Step seven is “start writing!”
8. I want to make clear that stream of consciousness writing still only has one rule: write what’s on your mind. These are just steps to help support that one rule.
9. Keep writing. In sentences. Lots of sentences. Avoid fragments.
10. Finish writing!
11. The topic you choose can be about anything. I’m not sure if I mentioned that earlier.
12. Don’t duplicate thoughts. Keep it original, this is about unlocking the creativity in your own mind, not rehashing other people’s opinions.
13. Stephen Sondheim once said, “The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper.”
14. Finish writing!