Belief and Technique in Modern Prose

I've been thinking more about writing these days. Obviously, I started a blog. I fear it may appear to be more out of narcissism than anything else. But really, at the heart of it was a desire to start re-exploring my creative side.

I have never enjoyed writing. Words such as "creative writing" made my skin crawl. I have tried to journal at various points in my life with no success. I hated the sound of my voice on paper and just lost interest.

And while I love reading, I enjoy it for its entertainment value and don't usually like to think of the craft aspect. Often, I enjoy the escapist component more than anything. While I can remember where on the page a certain detail can be found in a text book, 8 times out of 10 I can't remember the ending of any fiction I have read.

But I'm enjoying this. I enjoy my writing better when I shift my focus to writing for an audience instead of writing for myself. Sometimes I even think i'm funny. Not that I have any audience here, but I can have dreams, right? And while I keep waiting for the fabulous, pithy, entry that will prove somehow that I am an interesting person, with incredible insight, I haven't been able to create it yet.

I came across this in my horoscope in a copy of New City I picked up today. Supposedly, a list of tips for writing from Jack Kerouac.

Of course I read it. And to be honest, I found them to be as applicable to belief and technique in modern living as much as writing. But that might be where I'm coming from right now.

I'm feeling suffocated right now. I hate my job, hate the fact that my biggest concerns right now are car payments and new storm doors, and hate my complacency in my current situation. I'm yearning for something new and exciting. Yearning for a magical life. Yearning to throw off the constraints of the bourgeois life I seem to be entering into.

So while I am not much of a writer, maybe I can be better at living. I think I'll try to start with #4


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. 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 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