Jack Kerouac Lists 9 Essentials for Writing Spontaneous Prose

Image by Tom Palumbo, via Wikimedia Commons

Jack Kerouac said that you want your writing to “turn the free deviations (associations) of your mind into a sea of ​​thoughts that endlessly bump up the subject, swimming in the sea of ​​the English language with no discipline other than the rhythm of rhetorical exhalations and preached utterances…” Do you think you can do that? Follow Kerouac’s “” to find out.Essentials of spontaneous prose” He published this document the following year. black mountain reviews He wrote this work in 1957 in response to requests from Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs to explain how to write. underground man within 3 days.

And for Kerouac’s less than complete theory, Visit the site This is a paper by Marissa M. Juarez, former professor of rhetoric, composition, and English education at the University of Arizona. Juarez makes several salient points about why Kerouac’s “Essentials” perplexes English teachers. His methods “discourage review, condemn grammatical correctness, and encourage flexibility in writers.” Read the full text of Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” here Or less. [Note: If you see what looks like typos, they are not errors. They are part of Ker­ouac’s orig­i­nal, spon­ta­neous text.]

setting: Even in reality, objects are placed in front of the mind. It can be like a sketch (in front of a landscape, a teacup, an old face) or it can be set in memory and be a sketch from memory of a clear image object.

procedure: For the time being, the purity of words is important, and the sketch language is the secret ideas of the individual, the unhindered flow from the heart of words, which (according to jazz musicians) are sprayed onto the subject of images.

method: There are no periods to punctuate a sentence structure that is already arbitrarily riddled with false colons and usually unnecessary timid commas, but the brisk space dashes that punctuate rhetorical breaths (like a jazz musician’s breaths between bombastic phrases) are “the measured pauses that are the essence of writing.”
“Our speech” – “Division of audible sounds” – “Time and how to write it down”. (William Carlos Williams)

scope: Not according to the “selectivity” of expression, but according to the free deviation (association) of the mind into the ocean of thoughts that infinitely infuses the object.
He swims through a sea of ​​English with no discipline other than the rhythm of rhetorical breaths and clarification, as if every complete utterance brings a fist down on the table. (Space Dash) – Blow as deeply as you like, write as deeply as you like, read as deeply as you like, please yourself first. Then the reader is sure to receive telepathic shocks and meaningful excitements by the same laws that operate in the human mind.

Delay in steps: You don’t have to pause to think of the right words, but you infantilely pile up scatological words until you’re satisfied. It becomes a nice rhythm to add to your thinking and follows the great law of timing.

timing: Nothing that obeys the laws of time and time is muddied – Shakespeare’s dramatic emphasis on the need to speak now or remain silent forever in an unalterable and original way – no revisions (except for obvious rational errors such as names or calculated insertions in the act of inserting rather than writing).

Center of interest: I write not from any preconceived notions of what to say about an image, but from the jewel-like center of interest in the image’s subject at the moment of writing, swimming outward through an ocean of language to the release and exhaustion of the periphery. Don’t think about it as an afterthought, except for poetic or PS reasons. Never think twice to “improve” or distort the impression, because the best writing is always the most painful personal wrung out thrown from the cradle, tap from yourself a warm and protective heart, Blast your own song! – Now! – Your way is your only way – “Good” – “Bad” – Always honest (“ridiculous”), spontaneous, “Confessor is funny, because it is not “made up”. Craft is craft.

Work structure: Modern strange structures (such as science fiction) arise from the death of language, with “different” themes giving the illusion of “new” life. Like a rock in a river, the mind flow beyond the needs of the gem’s center (once you become aware of it) arrives at the pivot, following the general outline of the movement that extends beyond the object. There, the vaguely shaped “beginning” becomes a vivid and inevitable “end”, where, according to the laws of deep form, language is shortened in the race of work, racing against the wires of time, to the conclusion, the last word, the last drop – the night is over.

Mental state: If possible, by writing “without consciousness” (as in Yeats’s later “transwriting”) in a semi-trance state, the subconscious mind can acknowledge in an interesting, necessary, and very “modern” language, uninhibited, what conscious art would censor, and can write excitedly and quickly, with spasms of writing or typing, according to the law of orgasm, Reich’s “clouding of consciousness” (from the center to the periphery). I said coming from inside and relaxing towards the outside.

Oh, and to test authenticity, try Kerouac’s “Essentials” on a typewriter. That’s all he had when he wrote underground man. There are no grammar robots to distract him.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on the site in 2013.

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