On Monday, I shared about embracing chaos to liberate your writing. This prompt is a follow-up to that piece, to give you some more context and a chance to practice chaotic free writing this week.
I don’t remember where I first saw Kerouac’s rules for writers, but I’ve been sharing them with my writers and students for almost ten years. Apparently Kerouac had just come off a three-day writing session during which he wrote all of The Subterreaneans—he had written On The Road in three weeks a year earlier—when his boys Burroughs and Ginsberg asked him to lay down how he’d done it. Truthfully, the answer was Benzedrine.
Kim’s right.
But Kerouac did put together a list of directives for writing and life that he called “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.” I found it one day, printed it out, put it up on the wall above my desk, and walls beyond walls later the same dirty half-piece of ripped paper still hangs. Ginsberg apparently had the list above his desk when he wrote Howl.
Your prompt this week is to choose one of these rules and write a response to it, madman-style. You can pick any rule you’re drawn to, or try one of these strategies to choose:
In Ginsberg’s own account of the meaning of “first thought, best thought,” he says the primacy of image in the “first thought” is the locus of a piece of writing: “Meaning, the first raw flash on your mind that’s usually visual, before you mediate it and edit it and editorialize on it, and generalize on it or make it OK for other people to look at censor it ... filter it.”
So “first thought” might be interpreted as “first image.” Read down the list and pause at whichever one of these conjures a solid image in your mind, something from the physical world. Stop where your first thought is an image and dig down into that and draw it up in words.
Another experiment is to go down the list literally staring at each line until an image is clear, and then write down what you see and go anywhere from there.
Forget the image thing and try to just catch yourself in a thought, which kind of feels like when you suddenly notice that you’re driving. Stop at any thought, not judging whether it’s “good enough,” and dig in and divide it and keep dividing it, or write wildly without trying anything, not worrying if the connections you make from one thought to the next feel random. You are stopping at a thought just to have a place to start from. Or as Ginsberg puts it: “Like, Oh, well, I’m gonna think about what I was thinking about.”
Roll the dice and pick a rule to write about at random: What does it mean to you? What do you think it means? Where does it come from? Is it profound or musical or humorous or strange? Stupid? Once you’ve picked a starting point, let yourself go, let the madman take over and say anything.
Write without shame or judgment. If a thought of shame or judgment comes up, remind yourself—convince yourself—that the thought is a wave on the ocean of your creative power. Just let it wave on by, while you sink down where all the cool weird life happens, where everything strange is born and lives and dies and dissolves into whatever life is next, far below the surface.
Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, Jack Kerouac, 1958
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 center 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
Kerouac also wrote, “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
Will find, will be.
Whatever you write, however you write, do it with this same mad faith.
p.s. No posts next week as I travel back West. See you on the other side!