The Original Scroll

Posted by Case on January 9, 2013 · 3 Comments 

 

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
~ So you want to be a writer
by Charles Bukowski

 

 

I have decided that to prevent a whole load of word vomit and flailing overwhelmingness, I need to take this slow. No rushing over here. The first step I will take toward writing my own words is to copy someone else’s  Tonight I began writing down On The Road by Jack Kerouac, pen to paper. A young Hunter S. Thompson used a typewriter to copy down The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as Ernest Hemingway’a A Farewell to Arms, in order to learn about the writing styles of the authors and just to get the feeling of typing a great novel. This is a marvelous idea that I have often flirted with, and now it finally seems fitting for me to fall into another writers shoes.

In On The Road Kerouac tells the real story of his travels with car thief and Beat icon Neal Cassady, and the famous friends they met, drank with, and ignored. Kerouac famously typed this influential odyssey of jazz and drugs, of filling stations and marriage licences, of sex, and poolsharks, and hiballs, on one continuous scroll in only three weeks. The edition I am writing out is On The Road: The Original Scroll, published fifty years after the original, this version is complete with real names, places, and scandalous details.

Tonight I got down four pages of Jack. Feeling good.

“For krissakes man I know very well you didn’t come to me only to want to become a writer and after all what do I really know about it except that you’ve got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict,”
On The Road: The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac

Filed under Blog · Tagged with A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hunter S Thompson, Jack Kerouac, On The Road, The Great Gatsby, The Original Scroll