Jack Kerouac, Writing Guru
January 10, 2006
My friend Julie told me today that she is reading for the first time Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and is enjoying it. I recently finished Kerouac’s Windblown World: Journals 1947-1951, which has the following passage: “I’m going to write ceaselessly about the dignity of human beings no matter who or what they are, and the less dignity a person has the fewer words I’ll use. It’s the sheer humanness of a man that comes first, whether geek, fag, ‘Negro,’ or criminal, whether preacher, financier, father, or senator, whether whore, child, or gravedigger. I don’t care who or what—and that I should have cared before is an insult to Dostoevsky, Melville, Jesus, and my fathers.”
I first read Kerouac as an undergraduate, spurred on by a brilliant student and omnivorous reader, Ray Pruitt. In 1990 my friend Sheri Hostetler gave me a very short piece of Kerouac’s writing, “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose: List of Essentials.” Originally published in The Evergreen Review, Sheri had unearthed it while browsing in the Humanities Library at MIT, where she worked. I’d never read the list before but it took root in me such that, many years later, Kerouac was a guide to me as I was writing The Book of Mev.
Each of the four parts of the book has as an epigraph one of Kerouac’s maxims. Here’s the complete list of thirty.
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr 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 yourself
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