Serial Stream-of-Consciousness Stories (SSCS’s)
My Serial Stream-of-Consciousness Stories (SSCS’s) are a series of stories that I started in 2018 as something to dabble with, but that I picked up in earnest in 2019. I’m a very slow writer, and at the end of 2018 I had just finished the first draft of my 2nd book. That meant that 2019 was staring down the barrel of a lot of revision time. I like revising, but I’m very slow at that too, and my first drafts tend to be missing, among other things, stuff like names for half of the characters. It would be months before I could start seriously writing prose again, unless I started up something else on the side.
Enter the SSCS’s! The rules are simple:
- The writing should be fun. I don’t second-guess something just because it seems weird, or doesn’t match the theme I started with, or anything. If I like it in the moment, I get to run with it.
- Each episode should be roughly what I can do in a single sit-down writing session. That’s 1-2 hours, and remember, I write slow, so depending on the piece, that comes out to something anywhere between about 150 and 800 words.
- I’m not allowed to get sucked into working on an SSCS over my main writing work. To accomplish this last point, I rotate between SSCS stories, usually working on three at a time, all at different stages of probable completion.
Don’t be too alarmed by the last point, though. I’ll only publish them one at a time, and just one per year, starting each new one in January, and posting a new installment once each week.
Each installment number will have another funny number listed after it, e.g., Installment 1: 18.0509, or even something weirder, like, Installment 1: 18.0509-0515. In the first case, it means that Installment 1 was drafted on May 9th of 2018. In the second case, that drafting either went from May 9th to May 15th, or, more rarely, I actually went back and made a substantial edit on May 15th.
For the most part, I keep revisions as minimal as I can for these stories, and only edit them quite lightly before declaring them done and ready to publish. They’re meant to be fun – for me – to remind myself that writing is fun. So I’m not allowed to take them too seriously, even when the first draft’s all done. Also, I use them as a place to practice and experiment with writing forms and ideas that I’m not necessarily yet comfortable implementing in the rest of my work. So mistakes and places where things aren’t really working are very normal. To be successful experimentation pieces, mistakes need to be totally allowed. And if a mistake can’t be fixed with a tiny edit…oh well then.
I hope I’ll be able to continue this series of stories for quite a long time. For one thing, I don’t like not ever finishing a thing, and I’ve always got at least two of them not finished. For another, even when it feels like work to start on the next installment, I find that I’m always creatively refreshed and energized the next day. I get to make fun little stories – to prove to myself I can do that – and also to keep my brain healthier at the same time. Win, win!
I hope you enjoy the ones I have on offer. (Or that you avoid them if you don’t like them; unless you’re doing assigned reading, never feel, for whatever reason, that you have to read something that doesn’t give you pleasure. I’m a very picky reader myself – I won’t mind.) Each one is pretty different, and also pretty different from the rest of my work.
In the picture above are the story marbles I’ve made so far for the first four in the SSCS series. The first is full of purple prose and almost abstract. The second is my first real attempt to write something humorous. The third was actually sparked by a dream of mine – the first time that’s ever seemed viable for me and my weird-yet-also-boring dreams. And the fourth is the classic case where you take the main idea from somebody else’s story you really like and try to make it your own.
As of this writing, only the first of those is actually ready to go. Wish me luck!
And happy writing, or creating, or whatever-else to you to!