Anelise Chen has written a piece for Hydra Magazine about her visit to the Harry Ransom Centre's David Foster Wallace archive, Crafty David Foster Wallace.
It's an interesting piece because rather than focus on the discoveries she made, it ends up being a consideration of whether she should be looking at a writer's drafts and unfinished work in the first place:
Fast forward to April 18, the next Monday, as I was preparing for my undergraduate Creative Writing class. Based on my findings at the UT Austin archives, I was planning to do a kind of “editing workshop” where we would examine certain changes and “decisions” DFW made between the first and final drafts of his story, “Good Old Neon.” My plan was to project onto a large screen the first handwritten pages of “Good Old Neon” for us to study and scrutinize. For those who haven’t read it, this is the story about the character who believes himself caught in an endless cycle of fraudulence and so drives full-on into a concrete abutment. As I prepared my notes for my class, I began to get a sinking feeling that this kind of thing just should not be done. First drafts should not be shared with the public. The “magic” and “illusion” of fiction should not be revealed to just anyone, not unless they had really earned it, prayed at the altar of, & etc. Maybe these drafts contained information that the devout, practicing fiction writer should just keep quietly to herself. [...] What’s the point of this article anyway? I just wanted to tell a story about how I tried to show my class some drafts by a very famous and brilliant writer and got subsequently thwarted. Is it “right” to look at a writer’s drafts and unfinished work? Especially one who died in such a tragic way? Somehow it has an icky rubbernecking feel to it. But why?
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