/lit/ - Literature

>>20258597
>The reference to most of this stuff such including the part 2 is in the the notes/errata bit at the end of the novel.
There is nothing to suggest he wanted to include that stuff, it is just acknowledging that it is there and the first paragraph of the notes and errata plainly states that most of it makes no sense to the novel. He annotated his drafts heavily and wrote a great deal, it was part of his writing process and how he brainstormed, the bulk of what he wrote for a work would be discarded. You can get a glimpse of his writing process and see the evolution of the authors preface section which includes the conception of the novel (picrel) here;
https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll20
I have some more examples of his writing process but am not finding them online and do not have them with me at this moment (not at home).
>there is also an edition of the book with 4 incomplete chapters (one of which is very relevant to his suicide).
Those were chapters which DFW had decided to discard and abandoned or things which he would have liked to include but could not without fucking things up, if memory serves it explicitly states this in that edition but I could be conflating it with some other Michael Pietsch interview/writing, been to long since I have seen that and I just read them at the book store since I already had a copy.
>There is also articles and other things written by his widow.
Those seem very much like an author bouncing ideas of his wife and discussing the current state of it, nothing about them sounded concrete to me, at least in the article I read. If there is an article where she is more concrete than I would love to see it.

>>20208589
The Pale King may have ended up worse had he finished it, never know. From the introduction and other bits written by his editor on the topic we know the novel was essentially complete, he had a few section which required polishing and then time for editing. It may have changed a great deal in editing, but it may not have. He had a few sections he wanted to include but never figured out a way to work them in without damaging the structure and they were not important enough to fuck up or rework the structure for and those may have gotten sorted out and included, or not. From what I have read about DFWs writing process and what he learned since IJ and it's lengthy editing which required a complete rework of structure, he most likely had things fairly well sorted out and not much would have changed.

In June of 2000, David Foster Wallace had a wacky idea for "ultimate fiction," not that this idea was the greatest, just a way of playing with the idea of fiction. Picrel is the beginnings of that idea. And here is the evolution, first four drafts of how the idea evolved, the chapter which lays out the structure and some of the ideas of the novel.
https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll20

Anyone have links to other such stuff showing how authors evolved their ideas and their process?