David Foster Wallace's Writing Routine

The most footnoted novel in American literature was written in longhand, in blue or black ballpoint pen, in spiral notebooks, by a man who put a bandana on his head when it was time to work. Infinite Jest took roughly a decade in some form, from the mid-1980s to publication in 1996, and the manuscript that arrived at Little, Brown ran to nearly 1,700 pages. None of it was produced on a computer first. Wallace typed up what he'd written in the notebooks, which means the 1,079 published pages passed through his hand twice before a copy editor ever saw them.

The bandana is the detail that tends to get mentioned and then dropped, but it's actually the most instructive thing about how Wallace worked. It was a signal, to himself, that writing time had started. The physical ritual of putting it on served the same function that Hemingway's standing desk served or that Capote's horizontal position served: a deliberate state change, a way of telling the brain that what came next required a different kind of attention. For a writer who documented the struggle of sitting down with unusual honesty in his letters and essays, that signal mattered.

The Longhand Method

Wallace's choice to write first drafts in notebooks rather than on a typewriter or computer ran against the prevailing habits of his generation. By the mid-1980s, word processors were common enough in academia that a graduate student writing a novel could reasonably have typed it from the start. He didn't. He wrote in pen in spirals, then typed up what he'd produced, which gave every sentence in the final manuscript two passes before it ever went to an editor.

The practical effect of this on the prose is hard to measure precisely, but the texture of Wallace's sentences suggests something about it. His style at its most characteristic is layered and self-correcting, with qualifications arriving just after the main clause, corrections arriving after the qualifications, footnotes qualifying the corrections. A sentence that builds that way, with each new element arriving to adjust what preceded it, grows more naturally from a pen moving across paper than from fingers on a keyboard. The hand slows down enough that the next thought arrives before the previous thought is fully finished, and that overlap produces the characteristic Wallace syntax.

D.T. Max's biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story (2012) documents the notebooks in some detail. Wallace filled them at an irregular rate, with the better periods producing many pages and the worse ones producing almost nothing. The notebooks are at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, which holds the bulk of his archive. What they show, according to Max, is a writer working through problems on the page rather than solving them before he started writing.

The Teaching Schedule and the Work

Wallace taught at Illinois State from 1993 to 2002, then at Pomona College from 2002 until his death in 2008. The teaching wasn't incidental to the writing. It gave the day a structure that the writing alone couldn't provide, and for a writer who documented severe difficulty with self-direction during bad periods, that external structure mattered.

His letters from the Illinois State years, covered in Max's biography, show someone trying to protect writing time from the legitimate demands of teaching preparation and student work. He taught composition as well as fiction workshops, which required grading and conferencing that could fill hours if he let it. The writers who've had academic jobs know this particular problem: the institution will consume exactly as much time as you let it, and protecting the writing requires active resistance rather than passive good intentions.

Wallace's solution was imperfect, as his letters make clear. There were years when the teaching and the depression and the problems with the manuscript ate the available time and the fiction barely moved. There were other years when the structure helped and the work went well. The honest account of his working life, which is what the letters and Max's biography provide, is neither a success story nor a failure story. It's a description of someone doing an extremely difficult thing on a schedule shaped by forces he couldn't fully control, getting some of it done.

The Gap Between Ambition and Output

One thing that Wallace's routine makes visible, more clearly than most writers allow, is the gap between what a writer wants to produce and what they can produce on a given day. His essay "The Nature of the Fun," published in 1998, describes the experience of working on a large piece of fiction as a cycle: early excitement at the project's possibilities, then the long middle period when the thing you're writing bears no resemblance to the thing you imagined, then the point where you can see the gap closing and the work starting to become what it was supposed to be.

That cycle, as Wallace describes it, can take years at the scale he was working. Infinite Jest began in some form around 1986 and published in 1996. The decade between wasn't ten years of steady forward progress. It included periods where the manuscript went badly, where he wasn't sure the project was worth pursuing, where the distance between the book in his head and the book on the page seemed impossible to close. His letters document the anxiety of this with unusual frankness.

The bandana habit takes on more weight in this context. If you're a writer who struggles with the daily act of sitting down, the kind of struggle Wallace documented clearly, then you need a way to start that doesn't require a fresh act of will each morning. Putting on the bandana is a way of starting before you've decided whether or not to start. By the time it's on, the question is settled. This is the same logic as Hemingway's mid-sentence stop, just arrived at from a different direction.

What the Footnotes Owe to the Method

The footnotes in Infinite Jest are not a gimmick, though they've been read that way. There are 388 of them, running to 96 pages, and they contain some of the best writing in the book. Several of them are short stories. Some correct the main text, some extend it, and some exist in a different relationship to the narrative than either of those. They're a structural device that makes the reading experience formally mimic the experience of a mind in the middle of too many thoughts.

The longhand method probably contributed to this structure. Writing in a notebook, you can start a sentence, run a digression in the margin, mark it as a footnote, and return to the main line, all within the same physical gesture. On a typewriter or a word processor, the equivalent operation requires interrupting the flow in a more deliberate way. Wallace's notebooks, by Max's account, were full of margin notes and insertions that eventually became the footnotes. The apparatus of the book grew directly out of how he physically composed it.

Sources

The primary biography is D.T. Max's Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (Viking, 2012), which covers the working methods, the teaching years, and the composition of Infinite Jest in detail. Wallace's essay "The Nature of the Fun," first published in Fiction Writer magazine in 1998 and collected in Both Flesh and Not (Little, Brown, 2012), is his own most direct account of what the experience of writing a large piece of fiction involves. The letters are partially accessible through Max's biography; a fuller selection is held in the Wallace archive at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The archive also holds the spiral notebooks from the Infinite Jest period.

What You Can Steal

Wallace's routine is worth studying for what it says about sustaining work through difficult conditions, not just for productivity tips. The takeaways that hold up:

Create a physical signal for writing time. The bandana put Wallace into writing mode before he'd consciously decided to write. Pick something that works for your body and your situation, and use it every time. The ritual does work you'd otherwise have to do with willpower.

Write the first draft by hand if the work demands complexity. Longhand is slower than typing, and for some kinds of prose that speed differential is the whole point. If your sentences are coming out too clean, too complete, before you've actually solved the problem, slow down the instrument.

Build the teaching or the day job into the structure rather than around it. Wallace's academic schedule gave the day an external shape he couldn't have reliably imposed on himself. If you have an outside commitment that structures your time, work with it rather than treating it as an obstacle.

Document the gap honestly. Wallace's letters and essays are unusually clear about how much of the writing life consists of not-writing, bad writing, and writing that feels nothing like what you intended. That honesty is useful to read and to practice. The gap between vision and execution is normal. It closes, eventually, through the same work that opened it.

Let the drafting method shape the structure. The footnotes in Infinite Jest grew from how the notebooks worked. The form of the finished book was partly determined by the physical habits of composition. Pay attention to what your method is trying to do, even when you can't fully explain it.

The Routine at a Glance