“One big thing is to develop a strenuous accountability (you see it’s moral, no gadgets invade man’s true necessity), and the habit, the daily labor of writing en passant, keep a vast and cosmic diary. Imagine such a diary after a year’s time…two million words from which to hew (and hue) out a soulful story. Nothing’s impossible…the great novel of the future is going to have all the virtues of Melville, Dostoevsky, Celine, Wolfe, Balzac, Dickens and the poets in it (and Twain). The novel is undeveloped, it probably needs a new name, and certainly needs more work, more research as it were. A ‘soulwork’ instead of a ‘novel,’ although of course such a name is too fancy, and laughable, but it does indicate someone’s writing all-out for the same of earnestness and salvation. The idea is that such a work must infold the man like his one undeniable cloak and dream of things…his ‘vision of the world and of the position of things,’ say.”
–Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: Journals 1947-1951 edited by Douglas Brinkley
