For each character at each moment ask the question: what is this person afraid of? Their fears are like a fire beneath them that impels them to action. I suppose it isn't entirely based on a negative? According to Schopenhaeur it is. And I think him ultimately correct...

So just stick the fear in them (and perhaps some carrots in front of them) and watch them go. Through understanding the fears of each they are all real and interesting. Not just to the reader, but to the writer of course. It is perhaps the understanding of their fears that makes the writing it's most worthwhile. Trying to understand the different ways in which we each deal with our various fears.

And so each morning as they wake, what impels them to bother getting out of bed?

And it all falls apart as soon as you have a character who's fears you don't know yet whom you still have performing actions. Then you've just got random meaningless shit going on and why bother?
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Watched What Happened to Jack Kerouac? Totally changed my opinion of Kerouac. I did think him the main character from On The Road. He wasn't, nor was that some shining ideal to him. It was something that just interested himi (and it was only one of many many books he wrote which were wildly different from each other). Keroauc(sp) was an intensely anti-Dean Moriarity person. He was perpetually nervous and perhaps a bit aspergers, though I don't like the label. He did though have a friend like Dean Moriarity that in some way fascinated him. To me it only makes sense when I actually see in my mind the relatively young Kerouac speak.

Must say it's a bit depressing in that one can write and write and write and it just doesn't come through. Then you hear them speak for 5 minutes and bamm! it makes sense. (At least until near the end when he drank himself to death. Then him speaking imparted nothing of much use.) Makes writing seem a futile exercise. Although it's not always like that.

...and I must say you absolutely don't get it from his writing plus seeing pictures of what he looked like: http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?_adv_prop=image&fr=yfp-t-701&va=jack+kerouac&sz=all
In fact that takes you even farther away from the reality of who this guy was. The idea of some macho cool guy that we get from On The Road is only heightened by seeing pictures of Keroauc such that one assumes that was some kind of ideal he was surely trying to emulate.

Pictures (of people) generally speaking it seems to me are a lie. They do more to take us away from the truth of people than bring us closer to it. Sometimes it's best not to attempt to explain a thing, because a partial explanation is almost certain to take us further away from the truth than we are if we're just completely in the dark.

If on the other hand, you can see the way a person moves...
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From the movie also: What a prick William Buckley is. I don't see how anyone could hear/see him speak for any of his even typical 5 seconds of pretentiousness and not feel disgusted. How did the rightwingers not see it?

I think they liked that he came across as intelligent. Which being the party of the dumbasses has probably always been a sore spot for them. Now they've no one at all who can manage it, they've just got dumbasses like O'Reilly and so they've settled on smearing the left as elitist, etc. Something that they just could not have done while having such a nauseatingly pretentious prick like Buckley on TV.