Let’s examine interiority as a creative tool focusing on the internal writer experience and also visit interiority as a craft tool (as in the external reader experience) shown in literary examples. When exploring interiority as a creative tool, the focus ought to be on stream-of-consciousness (SoC) writing. The philosopher, historian, and psychologist William James (1890) is attributed to have coined the term stream-of-consciousness. We can’t talk about SoC without another interiority tool: free indirect discourse (FiD). Both are useful and effective craft tools. However, only SoC lends itself as a creative tool. The table below shows a brief overview of the differences between SoC vs. FiD. There are many similarities, but there are some nuances, which I have highlighted here.
| SoC | FiD | |
| POV | First-person | Third person |
| Tense | Present | Past |
| Tagged thought | No | No |
| Prose | Vocabulary of character present;
Use of abridgment, colloquialism |
Vocabulary of character present
Use of abridgment |
| Punctuation | Often missing | Use of ellipses, exclamation points |
| Formatting | Might have indented passages as in SoC | |
| Narration | No mediation | Little to no mediation; some argue there’s opportunity for fusion of author/narrator views |
| Examples in Literature | Ulysses – James Joyce
You Should Have Left – Daniel Kehlmann |
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
The Atlas of Reds and Blues – Devi S. Laskar |
It appears that social media culture instructs us to be inauthentic—to create a fictional character of ourselves. Dr. Brené Brown (social researcher and author of POWER OF VULNERBILTY) states that “In order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen.” If we aspire to create authenticity on the page, this process starts first and foremost for the writer. The writer must connect with herself, and see herself, without shame and judgment. I argue that the most effective way of accomplishing this as a writer is through the process of accessing your subconscious via stream-of-consciousness writing.