How Stream of Consciousness Writing Got Its Start

 Yes, I know Andrew Spacey's How James Joyce Developed his Stream of Consciousness Novels will not be of interest to all of you. I suspect this will be a fruit of my education you will not want to taste. I write this for the writers out there. The article gives examples of stream of consciousness became a technique for writers and the explains his subject in a straightforward way.

It was the brother of writer Henry James, psychologist William James, who first wrote about the stream of consciousness in his The Principles of Psychology, published in volumes between1878-1890.

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William James wrote : A river or stream is the metaphor by which it (consciousness) is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.

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Aspiring young writers, keen to sharpen their techniques and ride the modernist wave began to experiment in prose. For some novelists, 'looking into our own minds and reporting what we there discover' (William James) became all important; expressing the contents of a character's mind without interruption from the narrator was the way forward. 

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