View this post on Instagram A post shared by Elephant Journal (@elephantjournal) on Jan 4, 2019 at 10:32am PST

Jack Kerouac: Belief & Technique for Modern Prose [a How-To-Write Top 30]

A followup to my post on “How to Write” via Jack Kerouac.

This also hangs on my wall, five feet from where I write at home, it too has Allen Ginsberg‘s scribbling above and below it from a class I took with the great Beat grandpa back in Vermont, back in the day.

My favorite, that I often pass along as advice to writers and businessfolk stuck on how to say something, or name something, is number 22: when you’re stuck on how to say something, stop thinking about words and think about what you want to say, what it looks like, and say it.

BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE LIST OF ESSENTIALS 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

Bonus: