The Nature of the Fun

by David Foster Wallace

The best metaphor I know of for being a fiction writer is in Don DeLillo's "Mao II," where
he describes a book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the
writer around, forever crawling after the writer (dragging itself across the floor of
restaurants where the writer's trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in
the morning, etc.), hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and
incontinent and retarded and dribbling Cerebro-spinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls
and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its
hideousness guarantees it'll get: the writer's complete attention.

The damaged-infant trope is perfect because it captures the mix of repulsion and love the
fiction writer feels for something he's working on. The fiction always comes out so
horrifically defective, so hideous a betrayal of all your hopes for it – a cruel and repellent
caricature of the perfection of its conception – yes, understand: grotesque because
imperfect. And yet it's yours, the infant is, it's you, and you love it and dandle it and wipe
the Cerebro-spinal fluid off its slack chin with the cuff of the only clean shirt you have left
(you have only one clean shirt left because you haven't done laundry in like three weeks
because finally this one chapter or character seems like it's finally trembling on the edge of
coming together and working and 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; but also you hate it – hate it – because it's deformed, repellent, because something
grotesque has happened to it in the parturition from head to page; hate it because its
deformity is your deformity (since if you were a better fiction writer your infant would of
course look like one of those babies in catalogue ads for infant wear, perfect and pink and
Cerebro-spinally continent) and its every hideous incontinent breath is a devastating
indictment of you, on all levels . . . and so you want it dead, even as you dote and wipe it
and dandle it and sometimes even apply CPR when it seems like its own grotesqueness has
blocked its breath and it might die altogether.

The whole thing's all very messed up and sad, but simultaneously it's also tender and
moving and noble and cool – it's a genuine relationship, of a sort – and even at the height of
its hideousness the damaged infant somehow touches and awakens what you suspect are
some of the very best parts of you: maternal parts, dark ones. You love your infant very
much. And you want others to love it, too, when the time finally comes for the damaged
infant to go out and face the world.

FOOLISH OR FOOLING?

So you're in a bit of a dicey position: You love the infant and you want others to love it but
that means that you hope others won't see it correctly. You want to sort of fool people; you
want them to see as perfect what you in your heart know is a betrayal of all perfection.

Or else you don't want to fool these people; what you want is you want them to see and love
a lovely, miraculous, perfect, ad-ready infant and to be right, correct, in what they see and
feel. You want to be terribly wrong, you want the damaged infant's hideousness to turn out
to have been nothing but your own weird delusion or hallucination. But that'd mean you
were crazy; you have seen, been stalked by, and recoiled from hideous deformities that in
fact (others persuade you) aren't there at all. Meaning you're at least a couple of fries short
of a Happy Meal, surely. But worse: It'd also mean you see and despise hideousness in a
thing you made (and love), in your spawn and in certain ways you.

And this last, best hope – this'd represent something way worse than just very bad
parenting; it'd be a terrible kind of self-assault, almost self-torture. But that's still what you
most want: to be completely, insanely, suicidally wrong.

FUN WHERE YOU FIND IT

But it's still a lot of fun. Don't get me wrong. As to the nature of that fun, I keep
remembering this strange little story I heard in Sunday school when I was about the size of
a fire hydrant. It takes place in China or Korea or someplace like that. It seems there was
this old farmer outside a village in the hill country who worked his farm with only his son
and his beloved horse. One day the horse, who was not only beloved but vital to the labor-
intensive work on the farm, picked the lock on his corral or whatever and ran off into the
hills. All the old farmer's friends came around to exclaim what bad luck this was. The
farmer only shrugged and said, "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" A couple days later the
beloved horse returned from the hills in the company of a whole priceless herd of wild
horses, and the farmer's friends all come around to congratulate him on what good luck the
horse's escape turned out to be. "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" is all the farmer says in
reply, shrugging. The farmer now strikes me as a bit Yiddish-sounding for an old Chinese
farmer, but this is how I remember it. But so the farmer and his son set about breaking the
wild horses, and one of the horses bucks the son off his back with such wild force that the
son breaks his leg. And here come the friends to commiserate with the farmer and curse
the bad luck that had ever brought these accursed horses onto the farm. The old farmer
just shrugs and says, "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" A few days later the Imperial Sino-
Korean Army or something like that comes marching through the village, conscripting
every able-bodied male between like 10 and 60 for cannon-fodder for some hideously
bloody conflict that's apparently brewing, but when they see the son's broken leg, they let
him off on some sort of feudal 4F, and instead of getting shanghaied the son stays on the
farm with the old farmer. Good luck? Bad luck?

This is the sort of parabolic straw you cling to as you struggle with the issue of fun, as a
writer. In the beginning, when you first start out trying to write fiction, the whole
endeavor's about fun. You don't expect anybody else to read it. You're writing almost
wholly to get yourself off. To enable your own fantasies and deviant logics and to escape or
transform parts of yourself you don't like. And it works – and it's terrific fun. Then, if you
have good luck and people seem to like what you do, and you actually start to get paid for
it, and get to see your stuff professionally typeset and bound and blurbed and reviewed and
even (once) being read on the a.m. subway by a pretty girl you don't even know it seems to
make it even more fun. For a while. Then things start to get complicated and confusing, not
to mention scary. Now you feel like you're writing for other people, or at least you hope so.
You're no longer writing just to get yourself off, which – since any kind of masturbation is
lonely and hollow – is probably good. But what replaces the onanistic motive? You've found
you very much enjoy having your writing liked by people, and you find you're extremely
keen to have people like the new stuff you're doing. The motive of pure personal starts to
get supplanted by the motive of being liked, of having pretty people you don't know like you
and admire you and think you're a good writer. Onanism gives way to attempted seduction,
as a motive. Now, attempted seduction is hard work, and its fun is offset by a terrible fear
of rejection. Whatever "ego" means, your ego has now gotten into the game. Or maybe
"vanity" is a better word. Because you notice that a good deal of your writing has now
become basically showing off, trying to get people to think you're good. This is
understandable. You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing – your vanity is at
stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing: a certain amount of vanity is
necessary to be able to do it at all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal. At
some point you find that 90% of the stuff you're writing is motivated and informed by an
overwhelming need to be liked. This results in shitty fiction. And the shitty work must get
fed to the wastebasket, less because of any sort of artistic integrity than simply because
shitty work will cause you to be disliked. At this point in the evolution of writerly fun, the
very thing that's always motivated you to write is now also what's motivating you to feed
your writing to the wastebasket. This is a paradox and a kind of double-bind, and it can
keep you stuck inside yourself for months or even years, during which period you wail and
gnash and rue your bad luck and wonder bitterly where all the fun of the thing could have
gone.

TRY TO REMEMBER

The smart thing to say, I think, is that the way out of this bind is to work your way
somehow back to your original motivation – fun. And, if you can find your way back to fun,
you will find that the hideously unfortunate double-bind of the late vain period turns out
really to have been good luck for you. Because the fun you work back to has been
transfigured by the extreme unpleasantness of vanity and fear, an unpleasantness you're
now so anxious to avoid that the fun you rediscover is a way fuller and more large-hearted
kind of fun. It has something to do with Work as Play. Or with the discovery that disciplined
fun is more than impulsive or hedonistic fun. Or with figuring out that not all paradoxes
have to be paralyzing. Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go
deep inside yourself and 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 everywhere share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to
countenance yourself and to tell the truth 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.

The fact that you can now sustain the fun of writing only by confronting the very same
unfun parts of yourself you'd first used writing to avoid or disguise is another paradox, but
this one isn't any kind of bind at all. What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and compared to
it the rewards of strangers' affection is as dust, lint.
Analysis
M – Written
R – Casual High
G – Essay
A – Writers, Wider public
S – An introduction and three sections, The problem, a parable, a
solution
P – To Inform, ease writers, educate

David Foster Wallace's essay, "The Nature of the Fun" – first

printed in Fiction Writer Magazine, September 1998, then
anthologized in Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction.
The Taoist parable is real, although not every variation of the tale
is the same, the key takeaway is the message within, whether
things are to appear “good” or “bad”, it’s purely the
consequences of the event that truly dictate its effects. In this
instance, write, and deny thyself happiness for the sake of vanity,
or, indulge in the joy and be labelled as socially obtuse, either
which can be perceived as good or bad from a perspective, but
we simply can’t know. In the case of most writers, they must
balance on a rope between falling into a pit of mental anguish and
fatigue, or, falling into the pit of cancel culture. We choose how
our metaphorical ‘child’ adapts and grows, into a demanding,
snotty-nosed brat, or a bullied, weak one. Learning to have fun
and balance the scales, lest you and your ‘child’ become cadavers
in a pile of other “failed writers”, perhaps creating a facade is the
best choice, to fool the audience, and yourself.

“you have only one clean shirt left because you haven't done laundry in like three weeks
because finally this one chapter or character seems like it's finally trembling on the edge of
coming together and working and 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”

- Lack of Punctuation – emphasizes relentless struggle with

confidence in writing.
- One Comma near the end – catching their breath, a pause
for the reader to keep up endless stream of consciousness.
- Highlights the irrational nature of the fear – Chaotic –
Irrational fear of both forsaking your literary art for vanity, or
forsaking the public for a book (resulting in backlash from
readers)

“...this strange little story...”

- Use of allegorical tale (Akin to a folk tale as it is passed down

through generations)
“...forever crawling after the writer (dragging itself across the floor of restaurants where
the writer's trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, etc.),
hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and
retarded and dribbling Cerebro-spinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and
cries out to the writer”

- Brazen description of severely disabled child akin to a story

by a writer – Extended metaphor.
- Lack of Punctuation – Emphasizes emotional distress,
although in this case due to the love-hate relationship
between writer and “child”.