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child, I had given up on writing, perhaps un-
able to face what every writer must: all the
bad writing he will have to do before he does
any good writing. An interesting exercise
would be to collect all the worst writing of
any writer—which simply shows the pres-
sures that writers are under to write badly,
that is, not write. This pressure is, in part,
simply the writer’s own conditioning from
childhood to think (in my case) white Prot-
estant American or (in Kerouac’s case) to
think French-Canadian Catholic.
Writers are, in a way, very powerful in-
deed. They write the script for the reality
film. Kerouac opened a million coffee bars
and sold a million pairs of Levis to both
sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages. Now
if writers could get together into a real tight
union, we’d have the world right by the
words. We could write our own universes,
and they would all be as real as a coffee bar
or a pair of Levis or a prom in the Jazz Age.
1119/1780