David Foster Wallace's Writing Routine

TL;DR

A recent (2026) writers-routine site profile of Wallace's working method — longhand first drafts in spiral notebooks, the bandana as start-of-work ritual, the teaching schedule as scaffolding — synthesized openly from D.T. Max's biography and Wallace's essay "The Nature of the Fun." Mostly derivative craft journalism, but it advances one reading of interest: that Infinite Jest's endnote apparatus "grew directly out of how he physically composed it" — margin digressions in the notebooks hardening into the book's footnote structure — and it restates the mimetic reading of the endnotes (the form imitating "a mind in the middle of too many thoughts").

Key claims

• The method: Infinite Jest was "written in longhand, in blue or black ballpoint pen, in spiral notebooks," then typed up by Wallace himself — so the published pages "passed through his hand twice" before any editor. The manuscript that reached Little, Brown ran to "nearly 1,700 pages."
• The bandana was a start signal — "a deliberate state change" telling the brain that work had begun — compared to Hemingway's standing desk; the piece reads it as load-bearing for a writer with documented starting trouble.
• Composition chronology as stated: the novel "began in some form around 1986" and published in 1996; the decade included stretches where the manuscript stalled. Teaching (Illinois State 1993-2002, then Pomona) structured the writing days.
• Endnote facts as stated: "There are 388 of them, running to 96 pages"; "Several of them are short stories."
• The endnotes-from-method claim: Wallace's notebooks (per Max) 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."
• The mimetic function restated: the endnote apparatus "makes the reading experience formally mimic the experience of a mind in the middle of too many thoughts."
• Color details via Max: the two dogs, "Drone and Dave," kept near him while he wrote; the notebooks now at the Ransom Center.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The endnote apparatus grew out of the longhand method — notebook margin-digressions hardening into the book's structure

• Crux: endnotes-function
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] "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." [sec. "What the Footnotes Owe to the Method"]
  • [inference] The mechanism offered: in a notebook one 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" — an affordance a keyboard lacks. [sec. same]
• Notes: A compositional-origin reading, attributed to Max's documentation but with the causal leap ("grew directly out of") belonging to this piece, not to Max as quoted. It sits alongside — not against — the design-intent accounts of the endnotes (Wallace's own stated reasons): origin-in-method and design-function claims are compatible layers, and this source offers no draft citation for the margin-notes-became-footnotes specifics. Hedged in-source ("probably contributed to this structure").

THEORY: The endnotes make the reading experience mimic a mind with too many thoughts

• Crux: endnotes-function
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] The endnotes are "a structural device that makes the reading experience formally mimic the experience of a mind in the middle of too many thoughts." — with the anti-gimmick framing ("not a gimmick, though they've been read that way"). [sec. "What the Footnotes Owe to the Method"]
• Notes: A restatement of the established mimetic reading; no new evidence offered.

Themes

Composition and working method (longhand, the double-pass, the bandana ritual); the endnotes' origin and function; teaching and structure; the gap between ambition and output ("The Nature of the Fun" cycle).

Cross-references

• dtmax-every-love-story — the declared source of nearly everything here; consult it (not this piece) for any load-bearing biographical fact.
• rcmag-barnard-20-years-ij — Barnard has Wallace "seriously writing" from 1991; this piece says the novel "began in some form around 1986". Compatible framings (germ vs. sustained work), recorded cite-as-written across the two notes.
• themillions-shapland-cataloging-pale-king and newyorker-dtmax-wickedness — the notebooks themselves (commonplace books; the ~1999 taped-up notebook cover) as the physical layer this piece describes secondhand.
• The endnote-count claim (388) matches the novel's actual endnote count; the "96 pages" figure is consistent with the endnote section's pagination (pp. 983-1079).

Notable passages

• "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."
• On the endnotes: "a structural device that makes the reading experience formally mimic the experience of a mind in the middle of too many thoughts."
• The origin claim: "The apparatus of the book grew directly out of how he physically composed it."