I was going through some old boxes and I found this "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose" by Jack Kerouac. I often find myself using this checklist. Original spelling is used.
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 yrself
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 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 and Angeled in Heaven
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."
- Jack Kerouac
Your Golden Girl,
Olive
Image appears courtesy of Jack Addis/www.Jack-Addis-Art.blogspot.com
