Kerouac, Genius And A Writer's Dreams

Sometimes, we are our own greatest hurdle to overcome

In January, 1962, Jack Kerouac wrote an article for Writer’s Digest magazine called “Are Writers Born Or Made?” In it, he said writers are made because anyone who isn’t illiterate can learn to write. But, he said, geniuses like Melville, Whitman and Thoreau are born, not made. A scan of the original is here if you want to read it.

Read it again yesterday, can’t get it out of my head.

It haunts me, that piece.

When Kerouac wrote that piece, he was riding high on success. He had just published On The Road to wide acclaim a few years before and it went wild. The first print run bought his first of three homes in New York. Everyone wanted to know what he thought. Man of the hour. Heart and soul of the beat generation.

But the men he was writing about?

The geniuses?

They died broke.

Whitman published Leaves of Grass out of his own pocket and could only afford to print 795 copies. Spent most of his life as a journalist hacking out articles for the paper. Today we call him the father of free verse, but back then? They called his book trashy, profane & obscene. On his fortieth birthday he was unemployed, broke and living with his mother and siblings in a tiny little apartment in Brooklyn.

Melville also struggled. His first book did moderately well, but then his career crashed and he struggled with obscurity and financial ruin the rest of his life. 30 years after his death critics recognized Moby Dick as one of the great works of American literature.

And Thoreau? To say he was unknown would be an understatement. He was a pariah. An outcast. His ideas mocked, criticized, laughed at. Couldn’t find a publisher who’d touch his work so he published his work from his own meagre savings. We finally discovered the “genius” of his work long after he was dead.

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When I was five, I used to run down the street two blocks to the library, take out as many as I could carry home. One day I ran all the way home because I thought of a question I needed to ask mama. I burst in the door and blurted out — mama, who writes all these books? She looked at me and laughed a little. People, she said.

People like you and me? I asked and I know. Hope was written all over my face because mama gave me the soft look she always got when she had bad news.

And she said no sweetie, not people like us. People like us have to get jobs to pay the bills and I was absolutely crushed. Cried my heart out while she told me most writers go hungry. It was the theme of my life. Wanting to do creative things. Write, paint, design, make. Mama shaking her head, telling me to just go get a “real” job.

Just like Kafka’s father told him. Go get a job. Forget about writing.

All these years later, I know mama wasn’t entirely right.

But also? She wasn’t entirely wrong.

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There’s an episode of Dr. Who where Van Gogh travels forward in time and hears an art critic say he became one of the most beloved artists of all time. Most skilled. Most beloved. He turns away and weeps and I can’t watch that clip without crying.

So many writers. Lovecraft, Kafka, Dickinson, Proust, Plath, Poe, Nietzsche. Same story.

I could tell you stories of writers that we discovered after their death for hours. Days.

Plus all the unknown “geniuses” I can’t name or tell you about because they died unknown and we never discovered their work. Because those exist, too.

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Seemingly unrelated, but not. March will be two years I’ve been a boost nominator at Medium. I was invited into the beta program when it was just a new bebe.

We have a slack group for nominators, a place to compare notes and learn from each other. In theory. From time to time, someone will post a link to a story they nominated and was declined. They always say the same thing. They’re shocked it was declined.

It was so good, they lament. How did this get declined?

And, sometimes it is. But most often, it’s not. And I hate saying that, I do. But it’s true. It’s not that we’re utterly blind to what good writing is or isn’t. It’s that we confuse the story with the words used to tell it.

Often, I want to say this was a good story but it’s not well written. And I want to elaborate. Point out passive writing. Talk about the places it jumps tense. Talk about using third person instead of first when first would have been stronger. Talk about pace and flow, overuse of tropes, and the technical composition of the story.

But I don’t. Because I have learned that the hard way. It seldom goes well.

Most people are not terribly receptive to feedback unless it’s praise. If you are, trust me when I tell you that you’re the rare exception.

I do have a point.

I read that Kerouac piece last night. And when I woke up this morning, the first post I saw said Substack is having a surge in growth right now. Said a lot of people from Medium and LinkedIn are making the jump to Substack.

Which makes sense. It’s a New Year. Time to try something new, right? Now’s the time to do what we thought about last year. Dive in. Take a shot.

And I couldn’t help but wonder. If Kerouac’s “geniuses” would have died broke if they’d had a place like Substack or Medium at their fingertips. But they didn’t. They lived in an era of gatekeepers. People who said you’re too weird. Too out there.

Our dreams aren’t really so different than theirs. Just like those writers, we just want to be read. Find some measure of success, however we define that.

The difference is that we have reach at our fingertips. Reach they could only have dreamed of. But too often we let ego get in the way of our dreams. Don’t stop and ask if we can do better. Be better. Write better. Sharpen our pencil and stand out from the crowd by sheer virtue of our words. And I think that’s worth talking about.

I’d love to know what you think...

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If you like my writing, I also write on Medium

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