S & W as Departure PointAn illustrated book and a musical about a writing book is mind-jarring and sounds like a straight to pulp book and box-office loser. It makes one wonder whether Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus will be next. Every writer must read Strunk and White once. It is small enough for anyone to carry and the tips on paragraphs aren't written anywhere else, not even in Orwell's Politics and the English Language. Stephen King quotes from Strunk and White in his book On Writing and mentions the importance of the active voice, though it gets short shrift in both books and almost everywhere else. John Trimble also grossly neglects the active voice in Writing with Style. Damned useful is Garner's Dictionary of Modern American Usage which advises us not to use "viz." though this writer finds "viz." indispensable. Kerouac set down specifically a list of thirty "essentials" about his Spontaneous Prose method, viz. the following, Belief and Technique for Modern Prose. 1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy 2. Submissive to everything, open, listening 3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house 4. Be in love with yr life 5. Something that you feel will find its own form 6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind 7. Blow as deep as you want to blow 8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind 9. The unspeakable visions of the individual 10. No time for poetry but exactly what is 11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest 12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you 13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition 14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time 15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog 16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye 17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself 18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea 19. Accept loss forever 20. Believe in the holy contour of life 21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind 22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better 23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning 24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge 25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it 26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form 27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness 28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better 29. You're a Genius all the time 30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Good catch, WW -- yes, this is another style guide for writers I like a lot. Some fool will probably try to set this to music eventually too.

Could've been better...Too bad it wasn't illustrated by Ralph Steadman or R. Crumb.

well-called, bill.cute, why cute, one wonders.What's wrong with stark line drawing to make things plain?Or even a glorious tribute by MAD magazine's Sergio Aragones. I humbly refer you to: Sergio Aragones on wikipedia.

Thank you warren... I'd never seen these "essentials" before... That's what I love about this site...As for the rest what's next? Strunk & White on ice? Blech...Barney on Literary technique..."I love you...you love me...don't say shit say twee - twee -twee..."

Sergio Aragones! How well I remember those Mad Magazine illustrations. I bought a paperback book collection of his cartoons when I was in high school. It's probably still at my mother's house. Good call.