Jack Kerouac’s List of Essentials
Merlin over at 43 Folders has a post about a wonderful site for writers called Language Is A Virus. It’s easy to get caught up in all the great mind-bending (and mind-freeing) techniques awaiting unwary visitors in almost every corner of the site.
One of the things Merlin links to specifically is a list of Jack Kerouac’s Belief and Technique for Modern Prose. I started falling in love with Kerouac’s books back in the last year of high school, and it was about this time that my writing really took off. I found this particular list in a book about the Beat Generation, lingering in a stack of library discards (the content was deemed “unsuitable”), and it spoke to me immediately and with such a voice as I’ve never heard. This single page has been my chief source of inspiration for creative writing for a long time, and I have carried around a tattered type-written copy of it now for 18 years.
I’m glad to see it revived for the digital age, when Kerouac’s work might be deemed “suitable” once more.
Add comment July 8th, 2005