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This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

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193

The Nature of the Fun

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short but great (and very relevant) one about writing! starts off with a metaphor from Don DeLillo's Mao II (writing a book is like having a hideous infant following you around).

Foster Wallace, D. (2012). The Nature of the Fun. In Foster Wallace, D. Both Flesh and Not: Essays. Little, Brown and Company, pp. 193-202

194

[...] you're terrified to spend any time on anything other than working on it because if you look away for a second you'll lose it, dooming the whole infant to continued hideousness. And but so you love the damaged infant and pity it and care for it [...]

on writing a book being like having a hideous infant following you around

—p.194 by David Foster Wallace 7 years, 5 months ago

[...] you're terrified to spend any time on anything other than working on it because if you look away for a second you'll lose it, dooming the whole infant to continued hideousness. And but so you love the damaged infant and pity it and care for it [...]

on writing a book being like having a hideous infant following you around

—p.194 by David Foster Wallace 7 years, 5 months ago

(noun) the action or process of giving birth to offspring

194

something grotesque has happened to it in the parturition from head to page

on the hideous infant as a metaphor for writing a book

—p.194 by David Foster Wallace
uncertain
7 years, 5 months ago

something grotesque has happened to it in the parturition from head to page

on the hideous infant as a metaphor for writing a book

—p.194 by David Foster Wallace
uncertain
7 years, 5 months ago
198

[...] the discovery that disciplined fun is more fun than impulsive or hedonistic fun. [...] writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself an illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth of instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.

—p.198 by David Foster Wallace 7 years, 5 months ago

[...] the discovery that disciplined fun is more fun than impulsive or hedonistic fun. [...] writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself an illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth of instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.

—p.198 by David Foster Wallace 7 years, 5 months ago