Kerouac’s writing advice, titled Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, is more of an offbeat reflection on beat life than an instructive list that shows how to write like Kerouac. But I think that makes it more interesting, and more useful.
He reportedly stuck the list on the wall of Allen Ginsberg’s North Beach hotel room, just before the poet wrote Howl. Ginsberg then credited Kerouac as the biggest inspiration for his poem in the dedications.
Kerouac’s spontaneous prose then inspired many of the cultural icons of the 60s, including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Doors. He became an underground celebrity, and something of a forefather of the hippie movement.
If you can’t use the advice to improve your writing, you’re not alone. Even if the list doesn’t show you how to write like Kerouac, it’s an insight into how he approached art and life. And living like Kerouac is more interesting than trying to write like him. Enjoy his list below, and write like you.
Kerouac’s list (how to write/live like Kerouac):
- Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
- Submissive to everything, open, listening
- Try never get drunk outside yr own house
- Be in love with yr 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 centre of interest is the eye within the eye
- Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
- 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