Kerouac on writing

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.”

  1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
  2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
  3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
  4. Be in love with your life
  5. Something that you feel will find its own form
  6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
  7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
  8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
  9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
  10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
  11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
  12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
  13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
  14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
  15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
  16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
  17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
  18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
  19. Accept loss forever
  20. Believe in the holy contour of life
  21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
  22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
  23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
  24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
  25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
  26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
  27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
  28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
  29. You’re a Genius all the time
  30. 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 — 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

Tom Goodfellow 2 August 2007

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.

Kathryn Greenhill 2 August 2007

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”.

CW 2 August 2007

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! 😉 )

jl 2 August 2007

Ugh, Kerouac. Tried to read “On The Road” a couple of years ago, gave up, couldn’t see what the fuss was all about.

CW 2 August 2007

Yeh to be honest I am not a Kerouac fan either. I just liked the 30 essentials 😀

jl 3 August 2007

Agree, should have said that in earlier comment, the thirty essentials have merit!