Earlier this week, I tried to find a computer programme that allowed
me to turn speech into text, while I spoke. Thankfully, entering notes on my
phone allows me to do this, but this all came from an idle thought about
writing in a stream of consciousness style, hoping the mere act of continuing
to talk might yield something that could be useful in one of these screeds,
rather than go through a week-long bout of perspiration, trying to think of a
subject that could be both informative and entertaining.
However, once I started to do it, I started feeling like this may
not work. What you are reading here is, in fact, a VERY, VERY heavily edited
version of my talking, to myself, about trying to talk about streams of
consciousness, as if layers of reality, like layers of rocks over millions of
years, were bearing down on my brain. You may feel that you are free when you
can say anything you like, but when you have set yourself a task to be as free
as possible, before giving yourself a completely clear ground, with no
reference points, and nothing on the horizon, your journey is going to be
hellish.
Thankfully, with the way the English language is structured, with
all its nouns, prepositions, and subordinate conjunctions, one thing can very
easily follow the other, so off I went. What also helped is knowing that, if
the mangled results can be presented in a nice way, all contained within
paragraphs, it will, at least, be readable.
Having introduced the idea of streams of consciousness to myself,
Beat Generation writers like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs did come to
mind, with Kerouac’s original draft of his novel “On the Road” being one
continuous roll of paper, fed through a typewriter over the course of three
weeks. There was also an academic paper, accepted last month for a US
conference on atomic and nuclear physics, that was produced by Christoph
Bartneck, an associate professor at a New Zealand university, by using the same
auto-completion software I was using, to prove the conference was only looking
to make money – the paper was accepted, but asked for an expensive attendance
fee.
However, I knew I would be slowing myself down by referring to
things I would have to check were correct later – thankfully, they were, and I
could still use them.
I think my experiment was successful, but it may not extend beyond
this first stage – I was left with far too much rubbish to sort through, with
my phone, at one point, thinking I had launched “an investigation into sex,” which
has already been successfully completed by other people. Building a good
structure means you need to have a plan first, and that is where I feel
happier. Perhaps my words work better when you can see the sweat and effort
still dripping off them, I don’t know…
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