Wallace's writing life tracked his teaching jobs. He wrote much of his best-known work in central Illinois in the 1990s, then carried the same longhand habit west when he took a professorship in California.
Bloomington First, Then California
Wallace joined the English department at Illinois State University in 1992, which put him in Bloomington, Illinois. He wrote most of Infinite Jest there, in a house on Woodrig Road, where he reportedly painted one room black and papered another with manuscript pages. He was close to anonymous in a town where he ate breakfast at the local Denny's.
In 2002 he moved to Claremont, California, to become the first Roy E. Disney Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona College. He kept teaching and writing there through his final years. The setting changed, and the method stayed the same.
A Notebook Was the Desk
Because Wallace drafted in longhand, his real workspace was portable. A spiral notebook went wherever he did, so the question of where he wrote is mostly the question of where he was living and teaching at the time. The keyboard came later, once the handwritten pages were ready to type up.
The writing writing that I do is longhand. The first two or three drafts are always longhand.
David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way
See the full David Foster Wallace writing routine for how his teaching and his drafting connected.
What You Can Steal
- Make your setup portable. A notebook frees you from one perfect desk.
- Let the day job feed the work. His teaching and his writing shared the same standards.
- Keep the routine plain. He kept ordinary habits in an ordinary town and still finished the big book.
- Type second. Draft where you are, then move to the screen to revise.