Image by  Tom Palum­bo, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Jack Ker­ouac wants you to turn writ­ing into “free devi­a­tion (asso­ci­a­tion) of mind into lim­it­less blow-on-sub­ject seas of thought, swim­ming in sea of Eng­lish with no dis­ci­pline, oth­er than rhythms of rhetor­i­cal exha­la­tion and expos­tu­lat­ed state­ment….” Think you can do that? Find out by fol­low­ing Kerouac’s “Essen­tials of Spon­ta­neous Prose.” He pub­lished this doc­u­ment in Black Moun­tain Review in 1957 and wrote it in response to a request from Allen Gins­berg and William S. Bur­roughs that he explain his method for writ­ing The Sub­ter­raneans in three days time.

And for a the­o­ry of Kerouac’s not quite the­o­ry, vis­it the site of Maris­sa M. Juarez, pro­fes­sor of Rhetoric, Com­po­si­tion, and the Teach­ing of Eng­lish at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona. Juarez rais­es some salient points about why Kerouac’s “Essen­tials” bemuse the Eng­lish teacher: His method “dis­cour­ages revi­sion… chas­tis­es gram­mat­i­cal cor­rect­ness, and encour­ages writer­ly flex­i­bil­i­ty.” Read Kerouac’s full “Essen­tials of Spon­ta­neous Prose” here or below. [Note: If you see what looks like typos, they are not errors. They are part of Ker­ouac’s orig­i­nal, spon­ta­neous text.]

SET-UP: The object is set before the mind, either in real­i­ty. as in sketch­ing (before a land­scape or teacup or old face) or is set in the mem­o­ry where­in it becomes the sketch­ing from mem­o­ry of a def­i­nite image-object.

PROCEDURE: Time being of the essence in the puri­ty of speech, sketch­ing lan­guage is undis­turbed flow from the mind of per­son­al secret idea-words, blow­ing (as per jazz musi­cian) on sub­ject of image.

METHOD: No peri­ods sep­a­rat­ing sen­tence-struc­tures already arbi­trar­i­ly rid­dled by false colons and timid usu­al­ly need­less com­mas-but the vig­or­ous space dash sep­a­rat­ing rhetor­i­cal breath­ing (as jazz musi­cian draw­ing breath between out­blown phras­es)– “mea­sured paus­es which are the essen­tials of
our speech”– “divi­sions of the sounds we hear”- “time and how to note it down.” (William Car­los Williams)

SCOPING: Not “selec­tiv­i­ty” of expres­sion but fol­low­ing free devi­a­tion (asso­ci­a­tion) of mind into lim­it­less blow-on-sub­ject seas of thought,
swim­ming in sea of Eng­lish with no dis­ci­pline oth­er than rhythms of rhetor­i­cal exha­la­tion and expos­tu­lat­ed state­ment, like a fist com­ing down on a table with each com­plete utter­ance, bang! (the space dash)- Blow as deep as you want-write as deeply, fish as far down as you want, sat­is­fy your­self first, then read­er can­not fail to receive tele­path­ic shock and mean­ing-excite­ment by same laws oper­at­ing in his own human mind.

LAG IN PROCEDURE: No pause to think of prop­er word but the infan­tile pile­up of scat­o­log­i­cal buildup words till sat­is­fac­tion is gained, which will turn out to be a great append­ing rhythm to a thought and be in accor­dance with Great Law of tim­ing.

TIMING: Noth­ing is mud­dy that runs in time and to laws of time-Shake­spear­i­an stress of dra­mat­ic need to speak now in own unal­ter­able way or for­ev­er hold tongue-no revi­sions (except obvi­ous ratio­nal mis­takes, such as names or cal­cu­lat­ed inser­tions in act of not writ­ing but insert­ing).

CENTER OF INTEREST: Begin not from pre­con­ceived idea of what to say about image but from jew­el cen­ter of inter­est in sub­ject of image at moment of writ­ing, and write out­wards swim­ming in sea of lan­guage to periph­er­al release and exhaus­tion-Do not after­think except for poet­ic or P. S. rea­sons. Nev­er after­think to “improve” or defray impres­sions, as, the best writ­ing is always the most painful per­son­al wrung-out tossed from cra­dle warm pro­tec­tive mind-tap from your­self the song of your­self, blow!-now!-your way is your only way- “good”-or “bad”-always hon­est (“ludi- crous”), spon­ta­neous, “con­fes­sion­als’ inter­est­ing, because not “craft­ed.” Craft is craft.

STRUCTURE OF WORK: Mod­ern bizarre struc­tures (sci­ence fic­tion, etc.) arise from lan­guage being dead, “dif­fer­ent” themes give illu­sion of “new” life. Fol­low rough­ly out­lines in out­fan­ning move­ment over sub­ject, as riv­er rock, so mind­flow over jew­el-cen­ter need (run your mind over it, once) arriv­ing at piv­ot, where what was dim-formed “begin­ning” becomes sharp-neces­si­tat­ing “end­ing” and lan­guage short­ens in race to wire of time-race of work, fol­low­ing laws of Deep Form, to con­clu­sion, last words, last trick­le-Night is The End.

MENTAL STATE: If pos­si­ble write “with­out con­scious­ness” in semi-trance (as Yeats’ lat­er “trance writ­ing”) allow­ing sub­con­scious to admit in own unin­hib­it­ed inter­est­ing nec­es­sary and so “mod­ern” lan­guage what con­scious art would cen­sor, and write excit­ed­ly, swift­ly, with writ­ing-or-typ­ingcramps, in accor­dance (as from cen­ter to periph­ery) with laws of orgasm, Reich’s “becloud­ing of con­scious­ness.” Come from with­in, out-to relaxed and said.

Oh, and for authenticity’s sake, you should try Kerouac’s “Essen­tials” on a type­writer. It’s all he had when he wrote The Sub­ter­raneans. No gram­mar robots to dis­tract him.

via Al Fil­ries

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack Kerouac’s 30 Beliefs and Tech­niques For Writ­ing Mod­ern Prose

Cor­mac McCarthy’s Three Punc­tu­a­tion Rules, and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

William S. Bur­roughs’ Short Class on Cre­ative Read­ing

“Expan­sive Poet­ics” by Allen Gins­berg: A Free Course from 1981

Allen Ginsberg’s “Celes­tial Home­work”: A Read­ing List for His Class “Lit­er­ary His­to­ry of the Beats”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Many, if not, most writ­ers teach—whether lit­er­a­ture, com­po­si­tion, or cre­ative writing—and exam­in­ing what those writ­ers teach is an espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing exer­cise because it gives us insight not only into what they read, but also what they read close­ly and care­ful­ly, again and again, in order to inform their own work and demon­strate the craft as they know it to stu­dents. Let’s take two case stud­ies: exem­plars of con­tem­po­rary lit­er­ary fic­tion, both of whom teach at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty. I’ll leave it to you to draw your own con­clu­sions about what their syl­labi show us about their process.

First up, we have Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth and, most recent­ly, NW: A Nov­el. In 2009, Smith lent her lit­er­ary sen­si­bil­i­ties to the teach­ing of a week­ly fic­tion sem­i­nar called “Sense and Sen­si­bil­i­ty,” for which we have the full book­list of 15 titles she assigned to stu­dents. See the list below and make of it what you will:

Brief Inter­views with Hideous Men, David Fos­ter Wal­lace
Catholics, Bri­an Moore
The Com­plete Sto­ries, Franz Kaf­ka
Crash, J.G. Bal­lard
An Exper­i­ment in Love, Hilary Man­tel
Mod­ern Crit­i­cism and The­o­ry: A Read­er, David Lodge
The Screw­tape Let­ters, C.S. Lewis
My Loose Thread, Den­nis Coop­er
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
The Los­er, Thomas Bern­hard
The Book of Daniel, E.L. Doc­torow
A Room with a View, E.M. Forster
Read­er’s Block, David Mark­son
Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov
The Qui­et Amer­i­can, Gra­ham Greene

Smith’s list trends some­what sur­pris­ing­ly white male. She includes not a few “writer’s writers”—Kafka, J.G. Bal­lard, and of course, Nabokov, who also turns up as a favorite for anoth­er Russ­ian expat writer and author of Absur­dis­tan, Gary Shteyn­gart. In a Barnes and Noble author pro­file, Shteyn­gart lists two of Nabokov’s books—Pnin and Loli­ta—among his ten all-time favorites. Also on his list are Saul Bellow’s Her­zog and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Com­plaint. All three authors appear in a 2013 Colum­bia course Shteyn­gart teach­es called “The Hys­ter­i­cal Male,” a class specif­i­cal­ly designed, it seems, to exam­ine the neu­ro­sis of the white (or Jew­ish) male writer. With char­ac­ter­is­tic dark humor, he describes his course thus:

The 20th Cen­tu­ry has been a com­plete dis­as­ter and the 21st cen­tu­ry will like­ly be even worse. In response to the hope­less­ness of the human con­di­tion in gen­er­al, and the prospects for the North Amer­i­can and British male in par­tic­u­lar, the con­tem­po­rary male nov­el­ist has been howl­ing angri­ly for quite some time. This course will exam­ine some of the results, from Roth’s Port­noy and Bellow’s Her­zog to Mar­tin Amis’s John Self, tak­ing side trips into the unre­li­able insan­i­ty of Nabokov’s Charles Kin­bote, the mud­dled senil­i­ty of Morde­cai Richler’s Bar­ney Panof­sky and the some­what qui­eter des­per­a­tion of David Gates’s Jerni­gan. We will exam­ine the strate­gies behind first-per­son hys­te­ria and con­trast with the alter­nate third- and first-per­son meshugas of Bruce Wagner’s I’ll Let You Go. What gives vital­i­ty to the male hys­ter­i­cal hero? How should humor be bal­anced with pathos? Why are so many pro­tag­o­nists (and authors) of Jew­ish or Anglo extrac­tion? How have ear­ly male hys­ter­ics giv­en rise to the “hys­ter­i­cal real­ism” as out­lined by crit­ic James Wood? Is the shout­ing, sweaty male the per­fect rep­re­sen­ta­tion of our dis­as­trous times, or is a dose of sane intro­spec­tion need­ed to make sense of the world around us? How does the change from ear­ly to late hys­ter­i­cal nov­els reflect our progress from an entire­ly male-dom­i­nat­ed world to a most­ly male-dom­i­nat­ed one? Do we still need to be read­ing this stuff? 

I would haz­ard to guess that Shteyn­gart’s answer to the last ques­tion is “yes.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Fos­ter Wallace’s 1994 Syl­labus: How to Teach Seri­ous Lit­er­a­ture with Light­weight Books

Don­ald Barthelme’s Syl­labus High­lights 81 Books Essen­tial for a Lit­er­ary Edu­ca­tion

W.H. Auden’s 1941 Lit­er­a­ture Syl­labus Asks Stu­dents to Read 32 Great Works, Cov­er­ing 6000 Pages

The Book Trail­er as Self-Par­o­dy: Stars Gary Shteyn­gart with James Fran­co Cameo

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The way peo­ple read on the inter­net has encour­aged the pro­vi­sion of “tips,” espe­cial­ly pre­sent­ed as short sen­tences col­lect­ed in lists. While we here at Open Cul­ture sel­dom ride that cur­rent, we make excep­tions for lists of tips by authors best known for their long-form tex­tu­al achieve­ments. Richard Ford (The Sports­writer books), Jonathan Franzen (The Cor­rec­tions and Free­dom), and Anne Enright (The Portable Vir­gin, The Gath­er­ing) here offer ten sug­ges­tions each to guide your own writ­ing habits. Though pre­sum­ably learned in the process of writ­ing nov­els, many of these lessons apply just as well to oth­er forms. I, for exam­ple, write most­ly essays, but still find great val­ue in Franzen’s instruc­tion to treat the read­er as a friend, Enright’s point that descrip­tion con­veys opin­ion, and Ford’s injunc­tion not to write reviews (or at least, as I read it, not reviews as so nar­row­ly defined).

Some of these tips have to do with tech­nique: Ford advis­es against drink­ing while writ­ing, Franzen advis­es against using “then” as a con­junc­tion, and Enright advis­es you sim­ply to keep putting words on the page. Oth­ers have more to do with main­tain­ing a cer­tain tem­pera­ment: “Don’t have argu­ments with your wife in the morn­ing, or late at night,” says Ford; “You have to love before you can be relent­less,” says Franzen; “Have fun,” says Enright. And as any suc­cess­ful writer knows, you can’t pull it off at all with­out a strong dose of prac­ti­cal­i­ty, as exem­pli­fied by Enright’s “Try to be accu­rate about stuff,” Franzen’s doubt that “any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion at his work­place is writ­ing good fic­tion,” and Ford’s “Don’t have chil­dren.” Can we draw out an over­ar­ch­ing guide­line? Avoid dis­trac­tion, per­haps. But you real­ly have to read these authors’ lists in full, like you would their nov­els, to grasp them. The lists below orig­i­nal­ly appeared in The Guardian, along with tips from var­i­ous oth­er esteemed writ­ers.

Richard Ford

1 Mar­ry some­body you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.

2 Don’t have chil­dren.

3 Don’t read your reviews.

4 Don’t write reviews. (Your judg­men­t’s always taint­ed.)

5 Don’t have argu­ments with your wife in the morn­ing, or late at night.

6 Don’t drink and write at the same time.

7 Don’t write let­ters to the edi­tor. (No one cares.)

8 Don’t wish ill on your col­leagues.

9 Try to think of oth­ers’ good luck as encour­age­ment to your­self.

10 Don’t take any shit if you can ­pos­si­bly help it.

 

Jonathan Franzen

1 The read­er is a friend, not an adver­sary, not a spec­ta­tor.

2 Fic­tion that isn’t an author’s per­son­al adven­ture into the fright­en­ing or the unknown isn’t worth writ­ing for any­thing but mon­ey.

3 Nev­er use the word “then” as a ­con­junc­tion – we have “and” for this pur­pose. Sub­sti­tut­ing “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solu­tion to the prob­lem of too many “ands” on the page.

4 Write in the third per­son unless a ­real­ly dis­tinc­tive first-per­son voice ­offers itself irre­sistibly.

5 When infor­ma­tion becomes free and uni­ver­sal­ly acces­si­ble, volu­mi­nous research for a nov­el is deval­ued along with it.

6 The most pure­ly auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal ­fic­tion requires pure inven­tion. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical sto­ry than “The Meta­morphosis”.

7 You see more sit­ting still than chas­ing after.

8 It’s doubt­ful that any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion at his work­place is writ­ing good fic­tion.

9 Inter­est­ing verbs are sel­dom very inter­est­ing.

10 You have to love before you can be relent­less.

 

Anne Enright

1 The first 12 years are the worst.

2 The way to write a book is to actu­al­ly write a book. A pen is use­ful, typ­ing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.

3 Only bad writ­ers think that their work is real­ly good.

4 Descrip­tion is hard. Remem­ber that all descrip­tion is an opin­ion about the world. Find a place to stand.

5 Write what­ev­er way you like. Fic­tion is made of words on a page; real­i­ty is made of some­thing else. It does­n’t mat­ter how “real” your sto­ry is, or how “made up”: what mat­ters is its neces­si­ty.

6 Try to be accu­rate about stuff.

7 Imag­ine that you are dying. If you had a ter­mi­nal dis­ease would you ­fin­ish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop argu­ing with your­self. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.

8 You can also do all that with whiskey.

9 Have fun.

10 Remem­ber, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not ­count­ing week­ends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your tem­per, but it fix­es some­thing else. It makes you more free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

Sev­en Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion

Sev­en Tips From F. Scott Fizger­ald on How to Write Fic­tion

Ray Brad­bury Gives 12 Pieces of Writ­ing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

Ray Brad­bury Offers 12 Essen­tial Writ­ing Tips and Explains Why Lit­er­a­ture Saves Civ­i­liza­tion

John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspir­ing Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech

The Shape of A Sto­ry: Writ­ing Tips from Kurt Von­negut

Elmore Leonard’s Ulti­mate Guide for Would-Be Writ­ers

The Shape of A Sto­ry: Sev­en Tips From William Faulkn­er on How to Write Fic­tion

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.