I typed-off a David Foster Wallace story a few days ago. It was only 708 words, but typing it gave me a feel (literally – in the fingers) for what he is doing, how well he does it. Reading is good, but not the same, because it’s mostly passive. If you force yourself to write the words he wrote, in the same order, with the same rhythms, you experience the story as a writer. When your fingers stumble, that’s a sign he’s doing something you haven’t learned to do yet — structure, wording, tense, dialog. There’s an awful lot that David Foster Wallace does that we writers haven’t learned to do.

(“Only the copied text commands the soul of him who is occupied by it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text …” –Walter Benjamin)

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