Last night before bed I read a grand little brown hardcover called You’re a Genius All The Time, an artistic setting of two short Kerouac essays on spontaneous prose style. Jack Kerouac frowned on excessive revision and the obsession with Craft – he thought these could strangle prose and overburden a good sentence. Punctuation was another subject of disdain. He loved dashes, emdash, endash, hyphen, much more than commas, and used them to mark breaths to enhance the stream of his prose, like a sax player taking his ease for a few bars.
Is spontaneous prose the best prose? Beats me (yuk, yuk). First drafts of my novels and short stories are often crazy. The tale’s there, most of the time (my most recent, and most overthought, book yet glares at me from the back of my hard drive, awaiting the day a few weeks from now when I will advance against it with ink-pot and hatchet in hand), but the language – I reuse words, occasionally dive into cliche, once in a while break tone for a joke only I and a handful of people anywhere in the world will get.
So, I revise. I obsess. I clean. Much more than I ever do in my own office, or my bedroom. I’ve beaten into myself the discipline to examine my form and say “This is wrong, this sentence fails, these two pages or ten have no place in my manuscript.” The result is better. I don’t question that. But at the end of an editing slog, that spontaneous brush of pen on ink, of keys over board, is the feeling to which I must return if I want to make something cool, captivating, wild. And then I edit again, in hope that precision won’t spoil the rest of the effect.
There’s this story about a forest madman, who had never known language, running from the forest to kneel and give oath before Queen Elizabeth. It’s not enough to be mad. The greatest are mad for a purpose, noble madness, weird madness, divine madness.
Or maybe not. I don’t know. It’s all upaya anyway.