On The Road by Jack Kerouac

The path to your creative potential starts with a dream and a journey to self-discovery

Have you ever dreamed about or taken a roadtrip? Not the piddly kind I used to take in my early 20s, wherein I drove unusual-to-me routes to familiar locations just to see more of the Green Mountain state I still call home. No, I’m talking about a real roadtrip, the across-the-country kind in a car that just won’t quit with friends who just won’t quit even when you’ve forgotten what in the hell it was you aimed to do “out there.” The forgetting is half the fun because the ultimate goal, the goal you didn’t even know you had, was discovery — of country, of self.

West-bound roadtrips are something of a staple in tales of the American Dream, often involving fresh-faced young adults newly released from the school system and, finding themselves without schedules for the first time in years, finding out what “freedom” means. They invoke images of tops down, windblown hair and cheeks, and whoops of joy shouted, with abandon, into blue skies. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been curious about driving cross-country, though I haven’t done it. The farthest I’ve driven was to Buffalo, New York, a nine-hour one-way trip the destination of which was a hole-in-the-wall club at which I watched a now-defunct band play good tunes. And good tunes, music — the arts, broadly — are also staples of the American Dream, staples of a good life, staples of fulfillment.

I bought a copy of On The Road while pregnant and, having learned of the absolute mush one’s brain becomes during pregnancy and through the post-partum period, and several years and starts and stops later, I finally read this ever-loving masterpiece of the American Dream in August 2024, newly invigorated by the story after it was mentioned in Janis, yet nervous because my partner described it as a “slog to get through” (though he had to read it in highschool, so salt grains abound). Before I picked up this whopper of a run-on paragraph, I’d never read anything by Jack Kerouac, but understanding that the book I held was a copy of the original scroll helped tremendously. I’m intimately familiar with borderline unhinged, run-on thoughts, given that I work with authors to develop their books and have seen (and produced) my share of first drafts: Shitty, messy, unrefined, sure, but full of gold just the same.

On The Road did not disappoint. Further, it left me in a sticky-note deficit, for I had stuck my tome with blue squares repeatedly until the uncut edge was significantly wider than the bound spine—the reality of using paper to mark other paper.

The story begins with a dream

…I’d always dreamed of going west, seeing the country, always vaguely planning and never specifically taking off and so on.

Kerouac’s acknowledgement early on that many dreams are left to die to due lack of planning and action hit me hard. I’m currently about 12,000 words into drafting a novel I’ve been noodling over for more than a decade, and the most recent writing attempt is the fourth or fifth start-over. The first time I started the story, I knew many of the characters, but they were in the wrong roles. The second time I started, I chose the worst possible starting spot. Instead of starting at the beginning, I started in the middle, lost a whole bunch of character design in the process, and trashed another draft. The third and some-odd attempts were barely more than me getting back into the practice of putting fingers on keys in a creative capacity during the post-partum period. Obviously, those attempts didn’t go well. But this fourth attempt? This version of the novel feels right, somehow; this version of the book is the one that wants to live.

Kerouac’s quote served as a kind of warning to me: If I chose not to plan or take action, the idea of writing a novel would remain nothing more than a vague and amorphous fantasy, something to regret once I reach retirement age, reflect on my life, and realize I spent too much time couch-rotting and not enough working toward my dream life.

But starting a dream project isn’t easy, no matter how much insight or training you have. As

Ros Barber

shared yesterday:

So often, aspiring authors (even me, at times) view their unwritten books as magnum opuses, thus putting so much pressure on themselves to achieve their perfect visions that they become catatonic when it’s time to write because the perfection they dream about doesn’t immediately come pouring from their fingers in flashes of lightning-fast brilliance.

Instead, I’m determined to follow Kerouac’s example and embrace that glorious mess, spew word-vomit all over my pages with abandon, ean into all my chaotic and creative processes and methods and just write. No book can reach magnum-opus level until it’s written, and the pressure I (and maybe you?) feel is self-inflicted: Messes clean up.

I’ll keep reminding myself of this repeatedly until the novel is fully drafted. And only then will I bother to start cleaning up the messes I’ve made along the way.

The journey to becoming looks different for everyone (and for some, the journey includes drugs)

In the bar I told Neal, “For krissakes man I know very well you didn’t come to me only to want to become a writer and after all what do I really know about it except you’ve got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.”

Kerouac knew that absorbing information from teachers and mentors is but one (small) piece of the process of learning, of being a writer. The major factor toward success and belief is sticking with it, which he did. Though I’ve no interest in touching that pharmaceutical concoction (strictly a canna-Mom these days), I appreciate the image of the obsessive working artist borne of such a descriptor.

The obsessive artist is an artist fully absorbed in and focused on their artistic tast at hand, a person in their zone, their flow state. Kerouac, in this book, reminded me a bit of Maryanne Engels from The Gargoyle, in the way he put all of himself into the experience of living so that he caould write well, and the artist inside me screams in joy for the prospect. But putting all of oneself into living is as challenging as it is freeing because that rapt focus requires remaining firmly in your body and attached to your tools, requires blocking out all else lest distraction detract from the art.

Setting aside time to write each day is the gold standard for serious writers, but for those of us with responsibilities outside ourselves (hey, Moms; I see you), practicing such focused writing time feels like swimming through glue: Forward progress is offset by reality’s pull, the stickiness of life holding tight to the wrists and stopping the process. It doesn’t feel good to tell the family you’re incommunicado for an extended period of time, doesn’t feel good to look my young daughter in the face and tell her, “Go ask Dad,” but it’s necessary. Despite the guilt I may feel, at times, during creative exercises, I also know that allowing myself to be creative is a little present I can give to myself every day, which results in greater personal happiness and satisfaction and allows me to be more present during family time.

Creative transformations will mix you up before smoothing you out again

The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come then began which would mix up all my friends and all I had left of my family in a big dust cloud over the American night.

Within the pages of On The Road, I found myself bouncing from scene to scene as if in a transitionless dream realm, which is not the say that the book lacked scene trasitions; it didn’t. Rather, the book blended episode into episode until it was easy to lose track of who was family, friend, fiend, or foe.

Even Kerouac, at one point, seemed to lose himself:

I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, that I didn’t know who I was . . . I was far away from home haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds.

Perhaps it’s that the definition of “home” is a motif in my novel in progress, but the idea of being so far from home that you are far from your own person is fascinating and grotestque. Singer/songwriter Noah Gundersen said it first: “[H]ome is not a person or place but a feeling you can’t get back.”

Kerouac was having an intense sensory experience. Yet, he’d almost detached from himself. And I get it; I really do. I once woke up on a regular morning to discover that the life I had wasn’t one I’d designed for myself, that I needed to break free from it to discover who I actually was and what I wanted. That morning realization led to divorce, a move, a new partnership, a new home, and a daughter. Then, a few years later, a similar wake-up moment after a particularly stressful day in a corporate office led to plans to leave corporate and go freelance. Each of those moments, each of those awakenings, involved deep and lasting sensory experiences as I came of age during each new phase in life, detaching and reattaching, as needed, and molting into new versions of myself.

Recently, I talked about how coming-of-age stories typically follow 18-year-old kids making their ways into the adult world, but we should talk more about coming-of-age transformations that occur when the pre-frontal cortex matures and the adult is finally realized. The 20s coming-of-age change is hugely important in the quest for independence and individualism, in the quest for becoming the true self. Beyond pre-frontal cortex maturation, though, a coming-of-age change happens roughly every ten years as we continue to learn and grow, something I’m recognizing in myself now that I’m in my 39th trip around the brilliant sun.

Stories about critical life transformations and changes make my heart happy. That's why my novel-in-progress is an adult coming-of-age story, an adult reckoning with the self, an adult finding passion and purpose. I want future readers to know that the end isn’t the end until we’re dead, that there’s always a chance for something new and different, that it’s never too late to make positive progress toward living your dream, that even when pursuing dreams and being our truest selves, there is still plenty of learning, plenty of detachment, plenty of confusion as we change over time.

Night owls create with dreams

This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

Nighttime has a way of blending together past and present, good and bad, dreams and waking, sleep and speed. In my early 20s, during and after college, I worked nights bartending, usually until 11 or midnight when I closed down the bar, headed home, and stayed up until about 4 a.m. That precious span of time that hangs darkly, suspended, between midnight and the gray before dawn was magnificent for internal processing and creativity. Working nights helped me reinvigorate my love for reading, and I started writing again, creativity made easier by an intentional lack of internet and television service. While working nights, I spent all my home time working on myself. For me, the night is anything but confusion. Night is pregnant with possibility, ripe for creative imaginings and planning. During the sleepy time of the deep night, I was and am firmly rooted inside my body and feel the most complete and competent.

My daughter, however, is anything but a night owl.

She’s often awake at sunrise, fresh-faced and happy as she rolls out of her bed and into mine for morning snuggles before breakfast (and snuggles are my favorite alarm clock, by the way; I’d much rather hear, “Snuggle with me, Mama,” than the intermittent blare of a digital gremlin peering from red-number eyes.

And that snuggly love isn’t the only kind I need.

Love is the fuel that keeps us moving, keeps us creating, keeps us dreaming

All I wanted was to drown my soul in my wife’s soul and reach her through the tangle of shrouds which is flesh in bed. At the end of the American road is a man and a woman making love in a hotel room. That’s all I wanted.

Kerouac was a simple man with simple needs, one of which was love. I tell my partner all the time that I wish I could melt into him, that our flesh could encompass us both in one spirit. Whether we love each other in conversation or in the bedroom, we share this rose-colored image of love and experience it every day with each other. For that, I am grateful, and in that way, I have exactly what I want and am exactly where I need to be.

To slide into a fulfilling, creative life is to truly love one’s life; I know that’s my reality, and it’s a reality I wish very many more people in the world would seize. Hearkening back to the Noah Gundersen quote earlier, that feeling — of home, of love — is fleeting, changes rapidly and often, comes with new qualifications and expectations. Yet, feeling at home, feeling true love?

Those feelings comprise a life well lived, at least for me.

The American Dream is love, and love is a perfectly rational philosophy for life

Here I made an attempt to settle down those I love in a more or less permanent homestead from which all human operations could be conducted to the saitsfaction of all parties concerned. I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed in these things without going around making a dull middleclass philosophy out of it.

Well, I’m the dullard making a middleclass philosophy out of the American Dream, a person for whom the dream is not an ideal but a path, a person for whom the end goal is never an outcome but a process.

My American Dream includes being a mom, homeschooler, and homesteader; being an editor and coaching authors through writing and story development; being a writer and sharing the books I read and my oddball spiritual practices; being a visual artist and making art; being a gardener and spending time in nature. For me, the American Dream means having enough to do and achieve what I want and support my causes while living stress-free enough to truly live.

I was having a wonderful time and the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams.

The idea that life opens up when one has no dreams is so odd that I can’t really pull it into my consciousness to properly explore the concept. Without dreams, how can one begin to see the possibilities in front of them?

How exactly can the world open up?

Dreams are the portal to love and possibility

They are the mechanisms through which we see the ideal and reveal the path to reach it. They are the means to the ends we hold most important to our purposful pursuits.

My novel literally started with a dream I had about 17 years ago, a dream involving a guy I went to high school with, a guy I’d dreamed about so many times before (and no, if you must know; not those kinds of dreams). In the dream, I saw him in a happy place, a place that was his, a place that was safe for the young woman who would become the main character in my story years ago. While the novel I’m writing today is vastly different than the one I thought I was writing all those years ago (writing a novel made a great stand-in for therapy, lemme tell ya; divorce isn’t easy, no matter how it happens), the main storyline is the same as the one I dreamed about. In that dream, I’d felt at home, though I was not exactly myself. Or maybe I was, but I was a changed version. Regardless, dreams speak possibility.

Perhaps what Kerouac was really talking about is the limitation dreams can create when The Dream becomes a destination, rather than a journey, when our lives become shortsighted step-by-step processes to controlled and pre-defined outcomes. None of us need those kinds of old-school dreams. What we do need is the ability and confidence to dream boldly and freely and to work hard to achieve those dreams, even if and when they’re unlike anyone else’s.

So, what was the last trip you took on the road to self-discovery? Did it bring you to love, to dreams, to possibilities?