David Foster Wallace's Craft | Research

The big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love.¹

The Problem with Irony

Here’s the thing about irony.² It started as a way to expose hypocrisy. The great postmodern ironists—your Pynchon, your DeLillo—used irony to dismantle the false pieties of American culture. And it worked. Irony became the dominant mode of hip, sophisticated discourse.

But then something happened. Irony went from liberating to enslaving. It became a way of never having to commit to anything. You could say something and not mean it. You could mean something and claim you didn’t. The ironic pose became a way to avoid vulnerability, because if you never commit to anything sincerely, you can never be wrong, you can never be mocked.

The problem is that irony is singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.³

The New Rebels

What would be the next real literary rebels?⁴ They would be writers who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.

The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.”

Risk being sentimental. Risk being melodramatic. Risk being human.

Why I Use Footnotes

People ask about the footnotes.⁵ Here’s what I was going for:

Disrupting linearity. Real consciousness doesn’t move in straight lines. You’re reading a sentence and you have a thought about that sentence and then a thought about that thought and then you remember something from childhood and then you’re back. The footnotes try to capture that.
Information mimicry. We live in an age of data-triage. There’s too much information. The footnotes mimic that feeling of always having more to say than the main channel can accommodate.
Reader movement. I wanted the reader to go literally physically “back and forth” in a way that maybe mimics some of the story’s thematic concerns.⁶
A way to be discursive without destroying the narrative. You can include all kinds of stuff in footnotes that would derail the main text.

On Teaching Writing

Here’s what I try to tell students:⁷

The goal is not “expressive writing” where it’s good because it came out of you, where every reader is your mom. The goal is communicative writing where you assume this is a busy adult with her own interests and her own time commitments and her own interior life that’s just as vivid and important as yours.

The question is not “did I express myself?” The question is “will the reader understand what I’m trying to say?”

Ninety-nine percent of readers will reward you for clarity, for precision, for minimizing the unnecessary effort they have to make.

The Dangers

Here’s what to avoid:⁸

Vanity-driven writing. A certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it at all. But any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.

Mimicking the style without the purpose. My imitators⁹ copy the footnotes and the long sentences and the vocabulary without understanding that those techniques were meant to serve specific purposes. When they don’t serve a purpose, they’re just annoying.

Ironic distance as permanent mode. Irony is a tool. It’s not a worldview.

Self-consciousness as subject. I wrote a story called “The Depressed Person” that was about narcissism, and it was the most painful thing I ever wrote. The danger is always that you become what you’re satirizing.

The Heart of It

The tricky discipline to writing is trying to play without getting overcome by insecurity or vanity or ego. It’s work you should enjoy doing, because if you don’t, the reader won’t enjoy reading it.¹⁰

The average person you’re writing for is an acute, sensitive, attentive, sophisticated reader who will appreciate adroitness, precision, economy, and clarity.

Trust them. They’re smart.

What to Read

Fiction: Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, The Pale King

Essays: “E Unibus Pluram,” “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” “Consider the Lobster,” “Authority and American Usage”

Speeches: “This Is Water” (Kenyon commencement, 2005)

This is from my interview with Larry McCaffery in 1993, which remains probably the most comprehensive statement of what I was trying to do. I should note here that I’m deeply uncomfortable writing about “craft” as though I’ve figured anything out—the whole enterprise feels both necessary and fraudulent, which, if you think about it, is pretty much the condition of trying to be sincere in an age that has made sincerity itself seem like a pose. ↩
I’m aware that writing about the problems of irony is itself potentially an ironic gesture, which is kind of the whole trap I’m trying to describe. The snake eating its tail, etc. ↩
This is the key insight from “E Unibus Pluram,” which I wrote in 1993 and which people sometimes call my “manifesto,” though that word makes me cringe. ↩
I wrote this in 1993, and I’m not sure the rebels I was calling for ever showed up. Or maybe they did and I just didn’t recognize them. The whole question of whether sincerity is even possible in a culture that has so thoroughly commodified rebellion is something I never figured out. ↩
The footnotes in my essays are different from the endnotes in Infinite Jest. The endnotes in IJ require you to physically flip to the back of the book, which is annoying, which is kind of the point—the book is about addiction and effort and the willingness to work for reward. ↩
I’m aware this sounds pretentious. Most explanations of why writers do things sound pretentious when stated baldly. ↩
I taught at Pomona and Illinois State for years. The main thing I learned is that how good a teacher you are has very little to do with how good a writer you are, and a lot to do with how good a reader you are. ↩
I’m also including myself in these dangers. The line between using these techniques consciously and being a prisoner of them is not always clear to me. ↩
Is it arrogant to assume I have imitators? Maybe. But I’ve seen enough undergraduate stories with footnotes to know something is going on. ↩
This is maybe the most important thing: the fun has to be in the work itself, not in being admired for the work. When ninety percent of your motivation comes from wanting to be liked rather than wanting to discover something, the writing goes dead. I know this because it’s happened to me. ↩