Belief & Technique for Modern Prose
Jack Kerouac's list of essentials
Welcome to the 57th issue of the Lists of Note newsletter, sent to you on Jack Kerouac’s birthday.
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In 1958, a year after On the Road had electrified a generation, Jack Kerouac (born on this day in 1922) sat down and distilled his philosophy of writing into a list. It wasn’t a set of rules but a wild, freewheeling guide to living and writing with intensity, honesty, and abandon. He sent it to his friend and publisher Donald Allen, who later printed it in Evergreen Review, a literary magazine at the heart of the Beat movement. Titled Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, it reads like a manifesto, urging writers to surrender to inspiration, embrace imperfection, and write from the depths of their souls.
BELIEF AND TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE
List of Essentials
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
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Excerpt from a letter to Donald Allen (1958) from Heaven and Other Poems. Copyright © 1959, 1960, 1977 by the Estate of Jack Kerouac. Reprinted in Lists of Note by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic LLC