← Stream of Consciousness Workshop
Module Two
Art, Music, and the Non-Linear
Before we go deeper into stream of consciousness in writing, let’s take a detour. Because writers weren’t the only artists who decided to abandon the straight line. Painters and musicians did it too—and looking at what they did can help us understand what stream-of-consciousness writers were after.
Capturing Motion: Eadweard Muybridge
In the 1870s, a photographer named Eadweard Muybridge set up a row of cameras to capture a horse running. The result was a series of still images, each showing a split second of movement. It wasn’t one dramatic painting of a horse. It was movement broken into fragments—the way we actually experience motion, one flash at a time.
Think of stream of consciousness the same way: not one grand picture of a story, but a series of quick impressions, one after another, the way your mind actually works.
Painting Without a Subject
By the early 1900s, painters were asking a radical question: does a painting have to be “about” something?
These painters weren’t telling you a story. They were creating an experience. When you stand in front of a Rothko painting, you don’t ask “what does this mean?” You just feel something. That’s very close to what stream-of-consciousness writing does.
Marc Chagall’s I and the Village shows multiple perspectives at once—a man, a goat, houses, a farmer, all overlapping like memories. Georges Braque’s cubist paintings break a single object into fragments seen from different angles. These are visual versions of the way our minds hold multiple thoughts at the same time.
Music With and Without a Melody
Here’s an experiment. Listen to these two pieces of music, one after the other.
Two Kinds of Music — Two Kinds of Storytelling
Franz Schubert
Impromptu No. 1 in C Minor, D. 899
Melody = Story
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=musRVmHgUB4
Arnold Schoenberg
Piano Piece No. 1, Opus 23
No Melody = Stream
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0oxX5mMKEU
The Schubert has a melody—a musical “story” that has a beginning, a middle, and a sense of direction. You can hum along. You know roughly where it’s going.
The Schoenberg? The notes jump. There’s no melody you can follow. It might feel uncomfortable or disorienting. But it’s not random—it has its own internal logic, its own feeling.
If Schubert’s piece is like a traditional story, Schoenberg’s is like stream of consciousness. The music doesn’t follow a path you expect. It leaps. It surprises. And if you let yourself go with it instead of fighting it, you start to hear something new.
Watch: Early Abstract Film
Filmmakers arrived at the same idea. Hans Richter’s Filmstudie (1926) has no characters, no plot—just images flowing into one another the way thoughts do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeSMGfzMFBY
Hans Richter, Filmstudie, 1926. Images flow without narrative—a visual stream of consciousness.
Writing Activity
Describe a Painting
- Find a painting that has no obvious story—an abstract work by Kandinsky, Rothko, Chagall, or any artist you like. (Any of the images on this page will work, or find one on your own.)
- Look at the painting for a full minute in silence.
- Now write for 10 minutes. Describe what you see, but let your mind jump—from one color to a feeling to a memory to another part of the painting. Don’t organize your thoughts. Just follow wherever your eyes and mind go.
- Remember: you’re not writing an art report. You’re writing the experience of looking.
For Teachers & Parents
Playing the Schubert and Schoenberg pieces back-to-back is very effective. The contrast is immediately felt, even by young listeners. Ask: “Which one is more like a story? Which one is more like the way your mind works?”
For the painting exercise, printing or projecting the image works better than having students look at small screens. The point is sustained, quiet looking before writing begins.