Jack Kerouac is one of those rare writers who not only pioneered a new literary style, but was self-aware enough to set down its guiding principles.
Doing that was not only brilliant but courageous. When you lay bare your beliefs and your technical aspirations you invite hatred from (some) other writers, motivated perhaps by envy or their own failure to break through into their own literary style.
So did Allen Ginsberg call the original scroll version of On The Road "crazy and not in a good way". And most people remember that ghastly little swot Truman Capote accusing Kerouac of "typing, not writing."
(That's what they remember, Truman Capote. Your pettiness against a better craftsman, rather than your own work. Even Breakfast at Tiffany's, people remember Audrey Hepburn and not your tawdry book.)
Point #5 of Kerouac's Belief and Technique For Modern Prose holds a special position in my heart.
I don't understand why writers of fiction are still obsessed with traditional ideas of category based on length: novel, novella, short story. Even more modern forms of fiction seem to attract the the same strict categorisation: flash fiction, microfiction, the Drabble.
Happily there are now strong opposite forces at work.
The advent of online publishing has given power back to the writer, who may now publish (for free!) whatever he or she wishes to publish, in ebook or printed form. There are no longer any binding constraints about word count or genre or length.
So that writers (especially emerging writers) can just get on with telling their stories in ways that appear good to them, taking 10,000 words or 15,000 words or whatever it might take. None of the gospels exceed 20,000 words, and yet they each manage to tell gripping, detailed versions of The Greatest Story Ever Told.
My advice to writers? Backed up by Jack? Be guided by your own deep instincts and just tell the story that is within you. It will find its own form, it will tell you the right length. And it will also find its own readership, my instincts keep telling me: that a truthful story authentically told will find its way to where it needs to be in the world.
P. Julian
8 October 2018
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Here are the full 30 points from Kerouac's Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.
BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE
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. Dont 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
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