But there was more to the Scroll than Kerouac being ready to put the novel he had already composed in his notebooks and in his head down on paper. Kerouac had a theory of writing that he had developed in talking with other Beat writers. He called it spontaneous prose, and he even set down its tenets in “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”. Spontaneous prose was like jazz improvisation. You free associated, you followed riffs that occurred to you while writing, and you let the words flow, not trying to force them into a particular form. Another important tenet of spontaneous prose was “If possible write ‘without consciousnesses in semi-trance’”. It is the writer as jazz man. So Kerouac rigged out his 120 foot Scroll to put his theories into practice. The use of tracing paper perhaps came from the idea in spontaneous prose that you should sketch the words quickly, like an artist -- “sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words”.This isn't as simple as it sounds, and most everyone who has tried to follow Kerouac down this road has failed. It's more than just "making things up as you go along" - you have to have a foundation of processes and associations from which you can draw. You have to have the story in mind ahead of time and then riff of that. You have to destroy your original idea (superficial, overdetermined, too cute, too neat) in order to create something truer, and deeper, and richer. You have to work in "semi-trance" so you can overcome your conscious mind, your ego, your desire to force things a certain way, and just let the words flow.
The ego is there to keep you from writing. It exists to regulate your mind and keep things on an even keel. It is not there for the imaginative leaps of great art. The ego fears darkness and the abyss. So it will interfere, edit, distract. It will criticize and undermine. It invents "writer's block" and justifies your not writing. Perhaps what Kerouac was doing with the scroll was an attempt to do away with all of those barriers, both physical and mental. He was trying to set himself free.
