From the Wikipedia entry on Jack Kerouac:
Among the writings he set down specifically about his Spontaneous Prose method, the most concise would be Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of thirty “essentials.”
- Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
- Submissive to everything, open, listening
- Try never get drunk outside your own house
- Be in love with your life
- Something that you feel will find its own form
- Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
- Blow as deep as you want to blow
- Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
- The unspeakable visions of the individual
- No time for poetry but exactly what is
- Visionary tics shivering in the chest
- In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
- Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
- Like Proust be an old teahead of time
- Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
- The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
- Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
- Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
- Accept loss forever
- Believe in the holy contour of life
- Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
- Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
- Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
- No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
- Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
- Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
- In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
- Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
- You’re a Genius all the time
- Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
What brought this on, you ask? Just following links and looking things up while reading stuff in the aggregator this morning. This from reading Darren Rowse’s Gala’s Lessons in Blogging. Gala gives good tips; apart from 9. Remember Jack Kerouac (which was the reason for the list above), she also says:
8. Be brave & bold & positive.
Be yourself รขโฌโ your glorious, imperfect, passionate, contradictory self. People will love you for your honesty & natural raucousness. The world is so full of boring, sanitised, mediocrity that anything different will have your readers crying with joy. Write about things which make you smile, things which make you happy, & invite your readers to contribute. Create something which inspires others & makes them feel good.
I like this, because it reminds me of my colleague SGS’s “Be bold” exhortation. And it’s great advice.
And if I needed a reason to ask readers of this blog more questions (cf. Ask a question), yesterday’s post gave me a lot of interesting things to consider, not least of which was this essay which Stewart Greenhill pointed to: George Orwell’s Why I write.
6 Comments
Kerouac was a hack. Capote nailed it when he said “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” Good prose takes a bit of effort, Kerouac just took lots of speed.
The Orwell essay is fantastic though – now there’s a writer.
Hehehe…you just outed Stewart. I ddin’t know he was playing. I think he’s getting dragged into this bloggy morass. He looked at the link you made to his name and said sadly “I don’t have a blog”.
Thanks Tom. I was wondering who would point that out about Kerouac. I once had a friend who did a performance piece entitled Jack Kerouac was a spac written in that same kind of Spontaneous Prose style…
Kathryn I would have linked to Stewart’s Facebook profile but Facebook is a closed.. err.. book… I love that you’re getting dragged into the bloggy morass, Stewart. (M is far more resolute! ๐ )
Ugh, Kerouac. Tried to read “On The Road” a couple of years ago, gave up, couldn’t see what the fuss was all about.
Yeh to be honest I am not a Kerouac fan either. I just liked the 30 essentials ๐
Agree, should have said that in earlier comment, the thirty essentials have merit!