Jack Kerouac: A Guide to Creativity & Writing
Beautiful creativity sparked from the road
Amongst all the writers of the 20th century, Jack Kerouac to me stands out as one of the most genius and free-spirited writers.
In a note named ‘Belief and Technique for Modern Prose’, Kerouac lays down 30 rules for writing. This should be able to inspire any writer, even if only a little.
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Here are Kerouac’s 30 Essential Rules for Writing:
- Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
- Submissive to everything, open, listening
- Try never to get drunk outside your own house
- Be in love with your 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 centre 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 your morning
- No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge
- Write for the world to read and see your 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
For creativity purposes, my favourite is rule number five,
“Something that you feel will find its own form.”
In essence, anything that speaks to your own soul will find a way to transmute from idea to physical reality.
Even if what you feel may seem unimportant, it is felt within you for a reason. It’s up to you to undertake the alchemical process of turning ‘lead into gold’.
This also links to Carl Jung’s famous quote, “An old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.”
It is essential that you must keep going on your journey for self-discovery, whether this is through writing or any other form.
