mr. kerouac

As some of you may know, it was really that after I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac that I seriously contemplated becoming a writer. It was in reading that book that I realized my goals for the future and I am now a happier and more focused person in all aspects of life. On the Road changed my life when I read it and its profound affect on me is something that I cannot ignore. The writing style of Jack Kerouac also influenced my writing. The way that he not only tells a story, but allows you to feel the words is something that I try to emulate in my writing. As I was looking around my favorite website, wikipedia.org, I came across the Jack Kerouac page and I found this philosophy that he wrote by. After reading it, his work made much more sense and now I have a guideline on how to achieve my fullest potential in writing. These 30 points are what I am going to try and write by.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your 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 monologue.
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 your morning.
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language and knowledge.
25. Write for the world to read and see your 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.

That last one makes no sense to me, but whatever, that's 29 left. Also, I do not get drunk so I can disregard the one about not getting drunk outside of my own home. So now I have direction for my writing and after re-reading all of these, I realized that I was doing a lot of this anyway.