I confess to not knowing enough about David Foster Wallace before he hung himself on his porch last year. I blame blogging for using up the time that I used to spend reading new fiction. But it was also due to blogging that I learned so much about the man after his death. Many of his colleagues are bloggers.
The New Yorker has a long profile of the man's life. He was clearly tortured by special demons — ones that I can scare away with a sprightly walk to the coffee shop. But he was also tortured in a much more mundane way that we call all relate to. The writing process and professional jealousy also wore on him.
Wallace began writing “The Pale King” around 2000. A severe critic of
his own work, he rarely reported to his friends that anything he was
working on was going well. But his complaints about this book struck
them as particularly intense. Pietsch remembers being on a car ride
with Wallace and hearing him compare writing the novel to “trying to
carry a sheet of plywood in a windstorm.” On another occasion, Wallace
told him that he had completed “two hundred pages, of which maybe forty
are usable.” He had created some good characters, but the shape of the
book evaded him. In 2004, he wrote to Jonathan Franzen that to get the
book done he would have to write “a 5,000 page manuscript and then
winnow it by 90%, the very idea of which makes something in me wither
and get really interested in my cuticle, or the angle of the light
outside.”
his own work, he rarely reported to his friends that anything he was
working on was going well. But his complaints about this book struck
them as particularly intense. Pietsch remembers being on a car ride
with Wallace and hearing him compare writing the novel to “trying to
carry a sheet of plywood in a windstorm.” On another occasion, Wallace
told him that he had completed “two hundred pages, of which maybe forty
are usable.” He had created some good characters, but the shape of the
book evaded him. In 2004, he wrote to Jonathan Franzen that to get the
book done he would have to write “a 5,000 page manuscript and then
winnow it by 90%, the very idea of which makes something in me wither
and get really interested in my cuticle, or the angle of the light
outside.”
I'm loving "plywood in a windstorm."
Apt. 11d 
Today I’m supposed to be writing dissertation — of course, instead I’m reading blogs and facebook… I have to agree, writing is like trying to carry plywood in a windstorm.
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You should read DFW, starting with his non-fiction. Lots more like that.
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Can’t seem to find it now, but my review of A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again, one of his non-fiction books, was titled “A Supposedly Good Author I Will Never Read Again.”
I took my own advice, so I don’t have anything to say about Infinite Jest.
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I’ve tried twice to read “Infinite Jest” and never got past the first chapter. It has been sitting beside my chair since he died. Maybe I’ll try the non-fiction.
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