The Stream as Architecture

Woolf rejected the Edwardian inheritance — the well-made novel of incident — for what she called the 'luminous halo' of consciousness. Plot, she argued, falsifies the way a mind actually moves: by association, by sudden recollection, by the small interruptions of weather and light.

Read the opening of Mrs. Dalloway. The narration glides from Clarissa to a passing stranger to the sound of a clock, never asking permission. This is not chaos; it is a careful architecture of attention, built from free indirect style and the rhythmic return of motifs.

Sit for ten minutes and write whatever crosses your mind, in the order it arrives. Then go back and find the three motifs that returned without your asking. Those are the load-bearing walls of your scene.