Finish This Book: Stream of Consciousness

I seem to tackle my Keri Smith books in fits and starts. I'll leave them untouched for a while and then one day I find myself wanting to do nothing more than destroy my Wreck This Journal or plough through several pages of my Finish This Book. Sometimes this means you find yourself doing some rather bizarre or unusual things.

In the case of Finish This Book I wound up recently on a page asking me to write whatever pops into my head for several minutes. I took this to mean until I filled the page.

Now I've done this before. My OU Creative Writing course asked me to do the same thing for a period of time and to some extents I do it regularly with my journal. There are often days when I think I've got nothing to say about today until I sit down with my pen in hand and just let whatever is in the back of my brain flow down onto the page. But then again, I don't often share those writings with anyone.

This was kind of different because I knew that I would end up sharing whatever I wrote on here. Can you have a perfect stream of consciousness writing if you're concerned with self-censoring?

Here's what I wrote:

So the aim of this is to just write, write, write, without thinking about what you're saying. I guess it's likely to be a bit messy and rambling but I guess that's the point. I've done this stream of consciousness stuff before when I was doing my creative writing course. I'm supposed to just keep going without stopping. We'll see how long I can go. God, stream of consciousness me isn't too fussed about paragraphs. That'll make it easy to read afterwards. Does that say something about me? Perhaps that I've got a perfectionist streak? That's not really news to me. I am running out of things to ramble about now and I'm feeling distracted by my phone & the film we've got on. I don't think of myself as an easily distracted sort of person but I've got a cold & I'm feeling a bit out of sorts. I'm also trying to figure out just what people use Pinterest for. Man, I am really rambling now. This is so random. I also think my pen might run out soon. When I'm in Glasgow this week I'll buy more pens, or better pens, or whatever. Phew, only two more lines left. I'm almost done now. I wonder what all this says about me.

Anyone care to analyse all that (that is, if you made it through the massive block of text)?

I kind of love the fact that barely a few lines in I start criticising myself for the formatting of my writing. That actually does say quite a lot about the sort of person I am. I also like my random comment about Pinterest, I think this shows that I genuinely was just throwing down whatever was in my head onto the page.

And funnily enough, it did make me feel quite creative and like going and churning out some story into a notebook. Even just typing it up has me wanting to go and add to my Behind the Scenes story.

Have you ever tried doing any Stream of Consciousness writing? How did you find it? And if you haven't, why not have a go at it in the comments now?