Spontaneity

The Beats pride themselves on being spontaneous and see spontaneity as part of a person being true to who they really are. For a person not to act on his spontaneous desires is to give in to the rules of society and become "square." Commenting on the Beat Generation, Norman Mailer writes that their morality consisted purely in doing what they wanted to do when they wanted to do it, which is precisely what the Beats thought of as being spontaneous. The idea of spontaneity is also deeply important for the Beat's aesthetic ideas because for the Beats self-expression must be honest to be worthwhile. The most radical example of spontaneity in Beat work is Jack Kerouac's "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose." Kerouac advises eliminating periods because they slow down spontaneous expression and not revising first drafts because that would take away from the emotional honesty of the prose...