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What Jack Kerouac Can Teach You About Content Creation

 
Jack had this writing style called spontaneous prose where he just sat down and started writing-The important thing is to begin-as Plato said “The starting is the hardest part of the work”-Lots of times we have good ideas but we never get them off the ground-Our blogs lie dormant the exciting content wafting around inside our minds-We’re afraid of failure, we edit ourselves into oblivion or we just don’t know where to start-Well the best way to get around that is to just start and hope to god you fail—It’s better than accomplishing nothing— Jack sat down once and wrote out this list of 30 “essentials” to spontaneous prose-Maybe you can use some of them the next time your blog lies empty while your brain is full-That’s what I did….

  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 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

Read more about Jack Kerouac on wikipedia.com.

  • He is an inspiration to most writers. I particularly enjoyed how he submitted his work on toilet paper to the publishing company, and the messsage he sent with it.
  • Great post, Jesse - thanks for putting this up! So much advice about writing for blogs these days is about selling something other than ideas. After experiencing a month long blog-block, this feels more in tune with the way I think and how I want to communicate... A
  • Saw the page this was written on, in Kerouac's hand, about a year ago, at the "On the Road with the Beats" exhibition at the U of Texas' Ranson Center for the Humanities. Very inspiring.
    http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/2008/beats/
  • Love that you shared this with the blogosphere, Jesse. Outstanding list of thoughts! This causes me to want to create a more spontaneous prose-type blog, as opposed to writing just the business type stuff. Thanks!
  • You're very welcome Steve... I want to start offering up more poetic/literary/musical type posts. This seemed a good place to start.
  • That's a helluva thought, Jesse. I need to take my own mind back to my creative writing class days in college. There's so much that is both liberating and meaningful going the poetic/literary/musical route. Of course, Jack lays out a nice road map to start the process. Cheers.
  • I've always been a big fan of spontaneous prose, or 'the stream of consciousness', as it's also known. As Hemingway said, "The first draft of anything is shit," so why worry? Just get it out there.

    Then edit like a madman. :)
  • I'm a big fan of Hemingway's as well... Writing is like sculpting in the way that you start off with this big chunky idea and have to word widdle it down to something communicable..
  • guymmmmm
    I think you mean "whittle"...where I live "widdle" is a slang word for urination... :-)
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