Write with Passion

The Beat Generation of writers shook American literature in the 1960s, and this might be the most famous sentence they wrote. 

Jack Kerouac isn’t just conveying information. He’s conveying a feeling. The whole thing is one sentence, vibrating with the kind of passion it describes and if you read it out-loud, you’re almost breathless cuz there ain’t no conjunctions or sentence breaks to slow you down.

You’ll immediately see that Kerouac uses repetition to crank the Passion Dial to 100. Mad, mad, mad, mad. Burn, burn, burn. These repeating words in succession act like speed boosts within the paragraph, accelerating us forward. 

Then there’s hyperbole. If you’re going to use it, make sure the exaggeration is so grand that nobody could possibly mistake it for truth. Kerouac knew this. Like, obviously these people yawn, and obviously they say commonplace things, and obviously these people don’t explode like spiders. But the extremes paint a vivid and rapturous scene – a sense of passionate energy that breaks the conventions of grammar and syntax. 

Surely, a professional writer can’t publish a sentence like this? To that end, Kerouac wrote the first draft of this novel, On the Road, in three weeks, in one continuous go, on what became a continuous scroll that was almost half the size of an American football field. 

Forget about the rules when you want to communicate passion. Rip away the conventions. Let your emotions run wild. Who cares if you offend your 5th grade English teacher? That’s what Kerouac did, and it’s part of what makes this sentence so famous. 

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