The Howling Fantods

David Foster Wallace News and Resources Since March 97

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Home News by Category The Pale King How Finished is The Pale King?

How Finished is The Pale King?

Fantastic article over at Abstract Modem by Agri Ismaïl, The State of The Pale King (which now that I am posting this here, has disappeared with a broken link... you can still find it by searching for "Wallace" over there if it is still 404ing when you click the first link), it draws from Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading and the piece I posted a couple of days ago:
 
Personally I veer on the optimist side. I think anyone who thinks that it will be the first 400 pages of an uncompleted 1,200 page book are ignoring the work methods of authors like Wallace, who confessed to Amherst Magazine
I am a Five Draft man. I actually learned this at Amherst, in William Kennick's Philosophy 17 and 18, with their brutal paper-every-two-weeks schedules. I got down a little system of writing and two rewrites and two typed drafts. I've used it ever since. I like it.
From the descriptions of his agonising rewrites of everything, I find it very hard to believe that in 7 or 8 years of full-time writing on a project, he hadn't completed at the very least a first draft. Zadie Smith may write from A to Z, but Wallace never has. It's not going to be like "the story just ends" in the middle of a scene where Lane Dean Jr. is professing his love for Bella Swan but knows they can never be together because not only is he a vampire but he is also completely fictional. Rather, I believe it'll be a complete novel with some sections more revised than others. The absolute worst case scenario I can imagine is that he's described gaps in the narrative the way he did in Adult World II from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, [...]
 
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