David Foster Wallace's Best Writing Tip For Modern Authors

What should modern writers never write about? In today's video, David Foster Wallace will talk about the great debate in modern writing about whether we should focus on the Real Vs artifice in our work. This is a core question of the channel and is so vital that as a beginner writer, you must pick one or the other in terms of building a career! Thanks for supporting Real literature and fighting the literary fight!
Discover over 100 of David Foster Wallace's favorite books and the three books he wrote with by his side below
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[@Snarflelocker]

Dude is putting out so much content that he's owning 10% of my waking hours each day

[@tysonjames3155]

😂

[@angelagilmartin2109]

SERIOUSLY- I’m getting MK ULTRA’D into subscribing 🤣 it’s only a matter of time

[@lloydb5595]

Same, Iran is the based hero we need right now hopefully we don’t see him become the villain

[@mellonlord4616]

I watched this video and freaked out because I have a book being read by an agent, the book is about teenagers and I mention phones, video games, music....then I pick up the book I'm reading For Whom The Bells Tolls and Robert Jordan is going on and on about dreaming about Garbo and Harlow. Yeah, this stuff is still timeless.

[@ThomasRBarton]

I believe strongly that timelessness isn’t achieved through the lack of mentioning modern elements but through simply viewing them in terms of the relationship or role they play within a story. A book set in the 1920s may use betting on cockfighting or boxing whereas one today may use sports betting on mobile apps-specifics are rather pointless but what’s important is the role they play: establishing a sense of willingly giving money to some luck based system. A text message and a letter are similar in what they represent: communication over distance but maybe sending letters carries an additional relationship/role of taking a longer time. Depends largely on what dynamic and qualities of the element you are attempting to utilize.

[@kentjensen4504]

I'm midway in the video. I read somewhere that when Robet Towne wrote the screenplay Chinatown, he deliberately picked current themes (abuse of power, incest, environmental policy) and transposed them to a previous age wherein at least two of those themes were not openly discussed at the time. One could say he achieved timelessness by that act alone, and that this could be a deliberate approach others can use. Okay, back to your video, whch is beautiful, as always.

[@MrUndersolo]

There are plenty of artists who referenced popular culture. Why is this still a problem?

[@kentjensen4504]

@@MrUndersolo I didn't say it's a problem? I just contributed an approach used by Robert Towne in that one story. It's easy to come up with variants of this. No Country For Old Men is clearly a western moved 80-100 years into the future. Parts of HBO's Rome felt like gangster drama set in ancent Rome, etc. I can easily imagine a take on the Odyssey set in, say, the chaos in Europe just after WWI.

[@ainslie187]

Thumbnail is quite appropriate as the smartphone is the real life _Infinite Jest_ .

[@Charles3x7]

Another great one man.

[@youtubeisevil]

Inspiring discussion, rarely I hear this question mentioned

[@KalleVilenius]

So much of the high literature in the canon is tightly wound to the time and place it was written. How much of Dante is informed by the contemporary politics of Florence, how many references are there to people who might as well be imaginary to us who are unfamiliar with the context but were nonetheless real? What would Don Quixote be without the presence of the popular fiction of Cervantes' day, the chivalric romances that led to the events of the novel? Goethe would comment on the writings of Ossian in his stories, even making them a major plot point in The Sorrows of Young Werther, referencing the pop-culture of his day. And yet, are these not timeless works, still read centuries later? Everything is a product of its time, this is unavoidable. To try and escape your own era and society and the elements that constitute it will likely make your work incomplete, false. Our work should be a record of our time, not an attempt to deny it. The writer who captures the zeitgeist of their era will ever be a fountain of knowledge for future generations. And then there's things that are so of their time that they are completely lost to time, like the old Sumerian joke about the dog that walks into a bar where the punchline is completely incoherent to us. Guess the lesson here is to be more like the canon and less like the Sumerian dog joke.

[@jasonsanders8091]

Yes and no. If I look at Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons", for me one of the great Russian books, it is definitely referring to some current events, such as the rise of nihilism, the questioning of religion, etc. But much more than this the story revolves around relationships between one generation and the next, whether it is wise to throw out traditional values willy nilly, the value of truly listening to each other....timeless themes.

[@katfrog98]

Victor Davis Hanson said that he found his best students in junior college because they had life experience. When they read Thucydides they understood what was happening. Many had been deployed, some had seen action, other had done time, they had been in gang-fights, many of the women had children, or had raised younger siblings, they knew loss, they brought life experience to the class. University students, though they were more polished, brought nothing to the table. To write something that matters we need to know what matters.

[@jamesskinnercouk]

I’m sure there’s a market demand out there somewhere for “a day in the life of barky the dog”.

[@sabatheus]

I have modern, 21st century companies in my stories, but I invented them. They’re like characters with their own backstories.

[@TrutherRaps]

I fall on the timeless side, but I also think it's legitimate to mention products. While it would probably be more timeless to just make up your own products, like some of what David Foster Wallace has done (particularly, Although this is sort of just a reflection of real ones, his screamingly funny stuff about treats in "Mister Squishy"), I think it's as pointless not to mention Coca-Cola as it is not to mention America.

[@isaacslomski-pritz3116]

What about all those pre 20th-century writers who had vices and addictions?

[@ALEXLAD94]

You’re a smart cookie

[@jtrealfunny]

Dave Hickey? He wrote beautifully about Vegas.

[@B1ankeys]

But a lot of EDM is good though 🤔

[@ariekanibalie]

Sorry Sir, I like a lot of your content but there's a lot in this one I can't agree with. Firstly, I don't know where you got the idea that (life) experience = holding extreme opinions that might piss people off, but no, just no. Extreme opinions = a mark of insecurity and emotional immaturity, not wisdom gleaned through the ages. Second, the debate about pomo/experimental fiction vs classic realism was never about the contents, or whether a 'serious' writer should include references to technologies or other man-made phenomena that didn't always exist. As DFW rightly pointed out, a car or old-fashioned telephone at one point would also have been deemed unfit for 'realistic' fiction - but writing in the modern age where these things do exist, it would be tough to claim you're doing realism while keeping any and all modern elements out. The debate, and DFW's issue with certain strains of pomo/metafiction, was more about the form, and whether fiction could/should engage with sentiments and desires associated with 'the human experience' at a time when commercial media (and later, tech companies) were already doing this on a mass scale to advance their corporate interests. DFW recognised the limitations of some contemporary experimentalists to dispense with the human entirely and just whack readers over the head with endless irony and pyrotechnics, but clearly he didn't go the route of writing Mom and Pop novels with clear morals and transparant narrative either. As with so many things, there's no need to choose a 'side' in a debate so much as recognise the tensions between opposing narratives, groups and views. Isn't much of Pynchon's work concerned with the dangers of 'binary' abolutism? For example, if you're a Leftie like myself, it's nice to aim to be inclusive and non-discriminatory, but there's also the reality that not all people of colour, not all women in the broadest sense, are themselves necessarily on the same page. As for JK Rowling, she recently added holocaust denial to her trans-hating rhetoric, so yeah, that's a bit of a problem that crying CAnCeL cUlTuRe isn't going to resolve.

[@ojoloco6336]

this isn't water, this is clickbait 😣

[@sillythekid7380]

Hooooolly shit bro. I'm on top of this concept completely. For the last 3 years it's being written.