Jack Kerouac’s 30 Beliefs and Techniques for Writing.

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac  (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), often known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist of French Canadian ancestry, who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.

Jack Kerouac’s 30 bullet point list titled: Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, contains great gems on the art of writing and living. The list was included in Portable Jack Kerouac, a compilation of Kerouac’s novels, poetry, letters, and essay.

In the book, Portable Jack Kerouac, the editor writes:

KEROUAC WAS INTERESTED in writing, rather than writing about writing, and he made few efforts to explain or theorize about his work. “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose,” thirty terse, sometimes enigmatic phrases and commands, was an attempt to describe what he was
doing, but “The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” was a more extensive effort.

He wrote it at the request of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs in the fall of 1 953, after he had shown them the manuscript of The Subterraneans. His friends were so impressed by the fact that he’d written the entire book in three nights sitting at a table in the kitchen of his mother’s apartment in Queens that they asked him to describe how he’d done it.

Jack Kerouac’s 30 Beliefs and Techniques for Writing.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own JOY
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr 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