I was told that he literally taped reams of paper together and fed them into his typewriter, and pretty much went for it, typing without pause. Which seems to me the definition of stream of consciousness.
Not necessarilyāit may depend upon how you are using the term. One could type out a story on the spot this way that still follows the usual conventions for narrative storytellingāa single clear POV that only changes at scene breaks, new paragraphs for each new speaker and each new thought, and so on. It wouldnāt necessarily be written in the narrative style of āstream of consciousnessā as the term generally gets applied to, for example, the work Modernists like Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce.
Woolfās
Mrs Dalloway, for instance, that I mentioned above, is an attempt to capture in literary form the way human thought flits from one subject to the next, with repetition and forking and associations of disparate topics and so on. It does this both within a single characters stream of thoughts, and in the way the narration jumps from character to characterāthe narrative itself associates and flits, a level above the flitting associations of each character whose perspective the narrative visits.
Now, I donāt think Woolf achieved this by sitting down at her desk and writing it all out from beginning to end, following the stream of her own consciousnessārather, she made a series of considered narrative choices that were then refined in revisions, just as we all do when we write our fiction in our various styles. In other words, what people mean when they talk about the kind of stream of consciousness pioneered by Woolf is a form taken
by the narrative, rather than an indication that the work came out in or represents or captures a āstream of the
authorās consciousness.ā
Itās not entirely clear to me what the OP meant in asking the question, but maybe ChaseJxyz can chime in with some more thoughts about what the term means to him.
