Stream of Consciousness

What's the modern perception of the stream of consciousness style narrative?

Too gimmicky? Overdone? Or maybe difficult to do right?

I read somewhere that the reason David Foster Wallace used these long sentences with many clauses, in a style reminiscent of stream of consciousness, wasn't to represent internal monologue, but to write in a way which makes you feel like there's another person there talking to you.

That's always how I've looked at it. I've been employing the style for a long time, long before I read Joyce or Proust or any of the other authors known for it, but my motivation, like DFW's, was trying to write "like you talk" so that the prose would sound like somebody's there trying to tell you something which I think is effective in communicating more intimate ideas.

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it's none of that, dfw and other recent faggots use it to pull you in, before you get a 'break to think "this guy has no discernible talent" you're already two pages in and feel sort of committed. if you really wanna trick stupid fucks into reading your crappy writing for christsake dont open with some simpel sentence, write some long winding crap that just keeps going forward line after line never giving the reader a chance to bail and then suddenly they've gotten all the information they need to feel engaged and are almost at the end of the page so let us go a little further and now you have them...i'll always believe it's just a trick to make you feel "engaged" when really he's just not giving you a convenient spot to bail sort of like one of those desperate networkers who keeps shaking your hand for like two minutes straight while they blast you will their life story

I should have just pasted this in the OP to get some opinions on the whole "write like you talk" idea.

Found this in an essay by a well known venture capitalist who's surname is Graham.

>Something comes over most people when they start writing. They write in a different language than they'd use if they were talking to a friend. The sentence structure and even the words are different. No one uses "pen" as a verb in spoken English. You'd feel like an idiot using "pen" instead of "write" in a conversation with a friend.

>If you want people to read and understand what you write, yes. Written language is more complex, which makes it more work to read. It's also more formal and distant, which gives the reader's attention permission to drift. But perhaps worst of all, the complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you're saying more than you actually are.

>You don't need complex sentences to express complex ideas. When specialists in some abstruse topic talk to one another about ideas in their field, they don't use sentences any more complex than they do when talking about what to have for lunch. They use different words, certainly. But even those they use no more than necessary. And in my experience, the harder the subject, the more informally experts speak. Partly, I think, because they have less to prove, and partly because the harder the ideas you're talking about, the less you can afford to let language get in the way.

Point proven because I did feel compelled to read the whole thing but I'm sure I'd have stopped after another four hundred words if you weren't saying anything else worth reading.

he said "write like you talk" not "write like you're delivering a 20 minute monologue to yourself in the mirror" idk how you got "i should write page long sentences" from that essay..

I didn't. His practice of using spoken language in writing non-fiction articles is a bit different to using a literary device to try to represent thought.

I am currently, somewhat begrudgingly, reading IJ because I feel obligated to, and had a similar thought cross my mind about SOC as I was trying to classify what he was doing. It does seem similar but is less internally oriented, like you mentioned.

It's an interesting technique, but I find it lacking in aesthetic value, and a method that conveniently veils an inability to convey anything meaningful, that elongates minutiae and gives the semblance of meaning but ultimately leaves no real lasting impression. DFW is very good at this though. He's talented and the book is better than I expected because he can drive scenes in creative directions and build things up slowly and comically. I like it.

But as I read on I can picture the droves of young writers who have mimicked it and failed, and I thus think it unwise to do so. You're better off mimicking or following stylistically something with more structure that is less, mmm, psychological and depression-oriented. That gen-x 80s/90s drug-obsessed neuroticism is a thing of the past anyway.

A lot of postmodern writers did the same thing which is why I think the whole style is a thing of the past. The concept, however, might still work if done with some novelty or in a way more compelling than simply "elongating minutiae".

>The thing about Dasein is that it gives many fucks. Constantly caring about the past, present and future.

So this is the power of advice from vulture capitalists...

>A lot of postmodern writers did the same thing
Who are you referring to?