WEDNESDAY AUG. 19 –– Resumed work. Did *10*– difficult pages and have about 10 to go yet. I'm learning now that the 'artist' like every other kind of worker must work on schedule, push himself, hurry as much as he can, or, like any other worker, he'll never GET anything and really enough done. It's a lot of bull about the artist's –– having all the leisure in the world to 'work.' Work is involved with time; you can't waste time building a house at leisure or you'll never move in. The Utopia for 'artists' fits in with the inherent core of art-work… laziness and putting-off. So now I know this, after lingering as long as I have on the sea-chapter. I must knock off the final chapter starting tomorrow with the same urgency as the others in the novel, or it will stink, when eventually finished, with the smell of sloth. This is what makes a Hemingway spend ten years between novels –– even a Joyce. Dostoevsky wrote massively –– Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov inside of 12 years, 3 years on an average for each work. And take Shakespeare and Balzac, they had interior deadlines, they wanted to get things done, they wanted to live, not loaf. I am going to start another novel soon. Well, that is, soon ––
Journal Entry [19 August 1948]
Use the link below to visit The Kerouac Center at the University of Massachusetts in the writer's home town of Lowell, 'a collaborative, interdisciplinary engagement center broadly focused on the work of Lowell, Massachusetts native Jack Kerouac, as well as the cultural, political, and intellectual history shaping Kerouac during the post-World War II period.'
You might also enjoy:
The Write Advice 123: WILLIAM S BURROUGHS
No comments:
Post a Comment