You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes called "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.
Interpretation
Great storytelling and humor rely on the omission of information to elicit deeper connections in the audience.
In this quote, David Foster Wallace highlights the similarities between great short stories and great jokes, emphasizing that both forms of communication utilize 'exformation.' This concept involves strategically leaving out certain pieces of information in order to evoke a more profound response and create a richer tapestry of associations in the minds of the audience, leading to a greater emotional or cognitive impact.
In practice
An author discussing the craft of writing in a workshop.
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.
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 share and respond to, feel.
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
Bliss - a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
People try to pigeonhole comics by saying they're just for kids. So is The Odyssey. So is the Labors of Hercules, the story of Fa Mulan. The advantage of those stories over the contemporary ones is that they've had 2,000 years of editing. All the crap has been weeded out over time.
Art resides in the quality of doing, process is not magic.
You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
By fairy hands their knell is rung; By forms unseen their dirge is sung.
When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived.
From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.