Monday 20 January 2025
I start teaching classes this week. Revising my course assignment requirements and revisiting some poetry and nonfiction that I haven’t taught in years and adding them to my Spring’s reading lists, I am striving for a more effective, streamlined approach to my teaching. While fine-tuning my war classes and their course materials, I was more preoccupied with reflecting upon the now complete, and fully revised Katyn memoir manuscript. After all, there is a sense of safety that I feel currently, a feeling of security because I have taught this themed course, the war class, for ten years… having achieved that anniversary this Spring semester 2025… and… at least in the beginning… before the semester begins… I still have a clarity of mind to sit down and reflect upon how I reached this moment… finally… of finishing the Katyn manuscript.
When I started this blog series, The Revision Diaries, last year, I planned to write a “significant” and “comprehensive” blog post detailing my takeaways from drafting, editing, revising, and proofreading my Katyn memoir manuscript. This proposed blog would have served as a “final exam” self-reflection, one that I assign to my college students, but one I would take as seriously as a “final exam.” My first-year college writing students find, I think, such a reflection exercise to be helpful in the sense that, if written sincerely and fearlessly, they would discover some new, transformative insight that would break through some wall of writing inhibition, revealing not only new writing tactics and strategies but uncovering a fresh and innovative sensibility as a writer and thinker.
And what breakthroughs… what walls of inhibition did I break down… what creative and intellectual innovations did I unlock while devoting almost two decades to writing my Katyn memoir?
I already know that I probably won’t condense everything my conscious and unconscious mind has unearthed about my writing experiences into a single polished and eloquent blog. In one sense, I am still recovering from finishing the manuscript, and so whatever spontaneous or immediate self-reflection I now might share with you, Reader, also might be superficial and inchoate.
Nonetheless, a topic that I have been pondering about since I began writing the Katyn memoir is stream of consciousness writing. To be precise, my original aim for the Katyn memoir manuscript—when I realized that I was writing a memoir, not a scholarly history book—was to write most of the memoir in a stream of consciousness style. Why did I set out initially implementing this writing style, one that is intricate… and for some readers, an unnecessarily—even at times, pretentious—overcomplicated writing technique that disorients rather than clarifies things? My answer: to be as close as possible to the immediacy and honesty of the experiences I was, then, in real-time, having. I thought if this Katyn book was going to be about me, then I needed the reader to go inside my mind.
Stream of consciousness writing isn’t merely writing whatever comes to mind… no self-censorship, not repressing the immediacy and rawness of that exact moment of writing. Stream of consciousness writing isn’t strictly just writing without stopping… and, as your college writing instructors may have tried to coax you to keep writing… just repeat the last word until you “unstuck” yourself when you run out of ideas to write. Stream of consciousness writing isn’t only being carefree about grammar, punctuation, and all those tedious rules of formal writing. Stream of consciousness writing is perceived by some writers as “write what comes to mind, and don’t stop. Just let the writing flow, like a river.”
Well… not exactly. There is some truth to these claims, and I do like the overused river flowing analogy because of the image of the constant movement of the water splashing, eddies becoming stronger currents, the ebbing and flowing, the waterfalls, and torrents; however, the dilemma is how does a writer capture this movement of a river? Unlike a photographer or painter or video-recorder, the writer describes a flowing river with words. And if writers use stream of consciousness writing to describe the workings of the mind, with all of its competing and contradictory thoughts and being situated in the present while reflecting upon the past and projecting into the future and being distracted, confused, excited, depressed, hypersensitive, obtuse… on and on… doesn’t stream of consciousness writing ultimately become unbearable to read because, like a flowing river, it goes everywhere and nowhere?
The bare vulnerability of feelings, the frail privacy of insecurities, the petty but also profound acuteness of details… these treasures of ideas and feelings are what had attracted me to try writing my Katyn memoir manuscript in the stream of consciousness style. I knew as a student and professor of Literature that many of the literary innovators who employed stream of consciousness struggled persuading their first-time and contemporary reading audiences to embrace their experimental but confusing methods of writing stream of consciousness fiction, poetry, and drama: William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Jack Kerouac, Toni Morrison… all challenging writers using stream of consciousness.
For example, in 1945, Faulkner’s seventeen books were out-of-print because… dare I say it?… stream of consciousness writing. His books were difficult to read because of stream of consciousness writing. Certainly, after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and the renewed interest in his written art and university English departments now teaching his works, Faulkner and other stream of consciousness writers are now, relatively speaking, embraced by more willing and patient readers.
If writing stream of consciousness content was initially a failing prospect—the very best practitioners of the writing style didn’t immediately win over the critics or everyday readers—why did I think I could achieve a victory when my favorite artists couldn’t?
In the preface of the intolerably entitled book—English major Readers, you know what I’m talking about—from which the following quote comes from, Joseph Conrad writes:
“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything.”
I took this writing commandment seriously from my fellow Polish kinsman whose English-language books influenced me. Telling the reader that I was scared while being interrogated by Russian state security services—the FSB—and showing the reader that I was scared by their nighttime visit in my Saint Petersburg hotel are two different things.
How would I as a writer “make you hear” and “make you feel” and not simply and simplistically inform readers that the FSB knocked on my hotel room door and I was worried by their presence? I wanted to experiment with words. I wanted to be both a documentarian and artist. I wanted to be a literary psychologist psychoanalyzing myself; at the same time, I needed to be objective.
“Objective”? How could I ever be “objective” when narrating my Russian experiences, when chronicling my emotional reactions to this-and-that moment during my Katyn journey? Aren’t these and other dilemmas both the essence and idiosyncrasy of stream of consciousness writing? There is a point where communicating our inner most personal thoughts and emotions reaches an impasse because either we cannot find the right words to say what we mean, or our audience doesn’t understand us. And of course, stream of consciousness writing doesn’t make things easier when delivering and receiving our messages. And of course, what we feel, and think doesn’t always make sense to ourselves; how then do expect our audience to make sense of what we don’t/can’t understand?
More importantly, how should I make my Readers “hear” and “feel” what I heard and felt while being questioned by the Russian FSB, while gazing upon the Saint Petersburg’s Neva River? Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” now comes to mind. I could easily now start improvising writing this blog by allowing myself to drift in my unconscious mind’s “river current,” and write about stream of consciousness writing, Whitman’s poem, my FSB interrogation…. In other words, I would be writing stream of consciousness writing and very possibly lose many of my blog readers right now. Therapeutic for me as a writer and human being to get caught up in that mental and creative “river” current but alienating for my audience if I continue to use stream of consciousness writing right here, right now.
Stream of consciousness writing is excellent in theory, but in practice, it’s questionable at its best and problematic at its worst. I hear Steve’s ghostly voice reminding me again (and again) to be clear and simple. Because some potential readers will be unfamiliar or unaware of the Katyn Massacres, I shouldn’t complicate their reading experience while learning about the Katyn Massacres by writing “fancy,” using ornate and esoteric writing techniques. I don’t think I’m being overly artistic for art’s sake; nonetheless, disillusioning myself about writing stream of consciousness chapters was a hard but necessary lesson to accept.
When I shared my first rough draft of parts of my Katyn memoir manuscript with King Arthur, I had written the manuscript using the stream of consciousness writing technique. His immediate response: What are you talking about?” As I tried to defend my use of the literary technique, King Arthur’s repeated counterargument was: “How did it work out initially for Faulkner?” Touché. “His readers were frustrated and left him. His books went out-of-print,” I sadly and reluctantly admitted. That realization was the first acceptance of the reality that I needed to overhaul and revise the few fragmented and unpolished chapters I had written. This moment was long before the completion of the July 2023 manuscript. This moment was a precursor of things to come, and thankfully, King Arthur was courageous and honest to tell me the truth: stream of consciousness writing wouldn’t work.
I agreed… for the most part. King Arthur sensed my half-hearted willingness to abandon the stream of consciousness technique, too. If stream of consciousness writing were to work—and work well—then I needed to recast the technique in a more reader-friendly way. But how?
Shorter paragraphs were the first and obvious redesign. The sentence length was a corresponding alteration with paragraph size. In addition to making stream of consciousness writing work by making those two structural changes, I realized that I needed to be strict with punctuation and grammar; otherwise, one sentence can run-on and on, filled with too many to count run-on sentences and sentence fragments. One sentence shouldn’t be one long paragraph, right? I also experimented with using ellipsis—which I have incorporated here in my previous blogs.
Using the ellipsis became a powerful tactic to rescue the stream of consciousness technique. I felt that by using the ellipsis to slow down, without stopping the immediacy and the unfurling of the mood, revelation, or experience could translate into logical, coherent, and reasonable renderings of what I was thinking, feeling, and experiencing.
Additionally, I constantly reminded myself of an analogy my high school English teacher shared with me when we reunited two years ago. One of my first blogs here discusses that insight she bestowed upon me. And it is this: provide the reader with “subway handle-straps;” the reader will follow you but give them something to hold on while reading potentially challenging sections of my future Katyn memoir. Give the reader moments to rest and breathe after reading a gripping and intense moment from one of my Katyn experiences. Give the reader breaks to take in and interpret an emotional and deep episode from one of my Katyn experiences. Give the reader interludes to absorb the details and insights and potentially even question their own previous attitudes. In other words, give the reader a chance to read.
What drew me to stream of consciousness writing for my Katyn memoir manuscript was the sensibility—in its most ideal sense—of revealing everything to the reader. I admire the conviction of being honest and the sentiment of being vulnerable to share my experiences with the reader. Stream of consciousness writing isn’t merely an aesthetic to please, impress, or intimidate the reader; in its best sense, it should be an aesthetic to invite the reader to partake in the experiences, thoughts, and art of the writer.
I also gravitated toward stream of consciousness writing because the technique offered a way to capture images and thoughts and moods in real time, as they’re forming, ebbing, and flowing. How else than writing in the style of stream of consciousness would I, could I show the reader the exact changes in my selfhood when I was being interrogated by the Russian FSB officers?
Stream of consciousness writing isn’t a snapshot photo rendition of the mind processing experiences and emotions. It can’t end; it can’t stop. It keeps going on. I want to capture in words the contours, mutations, evolutions, blooming(s)… of the experience or emotion as they are occurring. I want to convey in words the inception and growth of my identity resulting from my Katyn journey experiences. I think stream of consciousness writing allowed me to try showing them.