Today would have been David Foster Wallace’s 50th birthday. Letters of Note has history’s greatest fan letter, which Wallace wrote to the novelist Don DeLillo just before the publication of Infinite Jest.
I have a hard time understanding how Fun fits into the Dedication-Discipline-Respect schema. I know that I had less fun doing IJ than I did doing earlier stuff, even though I know in my tummy that it’s better fiction. I think I understand that part of getting older and better as a writer means putting away many of my more childish self-gratifying notions of Fun, etc. But Fun is still the whole point, somehow, no? Fun on both sides of the writer/reader exchange? A kind of pleasure — more rarified, doubtless, than M&M’s or a good wank, but nevertheless pleasure. How do I allow myself to have Fun when writing without sacrificing Respect and Seriousness, i.e. going back to the exhibitionism and show-offery and pointless technical acrobatics?
Thank you a million times for pointing me to this. I’m in the middle right now of both reading Infinite Jest and writing the last quarter of a novel of my own, and this letter couldn’t more perfectly conjunct the two.
Good luck with the book. Keep plugging away!