Jack Kerouac Interviewed

 Oh, boy. I admit I am not as wild about Kerouac as a lot of people. I have read On the Road twice. The second time was in prison and I appreciated the writing more the second time. 

But his importance I cannot deny, so I tried making my way through The Paris Review's Jack Kerouac, The Art of Fiction No. 41. I was not entirely successful. The man gushed words like a fire hydrant, or a drunk. About writing novels, this caught my attention:

...By not revising what you’ve already written you simply give the reader the actual workings of your mind during the writing itself: you confess your thoughts about events in your own unchangeable way ... Well, look, did you ever hear a guy telling a long wild tale to a bunch of men in a bar and all are listening and smiling, did you ever hear that guy stop to revise himself, go back to a previous sentence to improve it, to defray its rhythmic thought impact. ... If he pauses to blow his nose, isn’t he planning his next sentence? And when he lets that next sentence loose, isn’t it once and for all the way he wanted to say it? Doesn’t he depart from the thought of that sentence and, as Shakespeare says, “forever holds his tongue” on the subject, since he’s passed over it like a part of a river that flows over a rock once and for all and never returns and can never flow any other way in time?....

When I was young, I thought the first draft was the only draft. These notes here are all first drafts. There are - I think - points of good writing here. I think they are honest in word choice and content. 

I know I am not a great writer whose novels have inspired generations but I think Kerouac is wrong. I learned the need for revision while practicing law - the first word, the first phrasing, may need improvement. Could be a failure of my brains, that I am a lazy writer who writes too fast. I thought myself broke of using the same word in close proximity, but a few days ago KH caught me doing this with "Passerby".  (Not that I do not see repetition can be a tool but I think some of this is due to the faults mentioned plus legal training where the goal with words is not felicity but certainty.) Any honesty lost in revision seems like not much of an honesty. Then, too, I will never write a novel with the impact of On the Road.

sch 5/31/22