First, make me care

In conversation with Michael Silverblatt in 1996 (this is from a machine generated transcript, I’ll do my best to clean up after it’s attempts to parse DFW’s stammering):

> ...I guess when I was in my twenties, like deep down underneath all the bullshit, what I really believed was that the point of fiction was to show that the writer was really smart. And that sounds terrible to say. But I think looking back, that's what was going on. And uh I don't think I really understood what loneliness was when when I was a young man and and now I've got a much less clear idea of what the point of art is, but I think it's got something to do with loneliness, and something to do with setting up a conversation between human beings. And I know that when I started this book I wanted to I—I had very—I had very vague and not very ambitious ambitions. And one was I wanted to do something really sad. I'd done comedy before. I wanted to do something really sad. And I wanted to do something about what was sad about America. And um I—there's a—there's a fair amount of of weird and hard technical stuff going on in this book, but I mean one reason why I'm willing to go around and talk to people about it and that I'm sorta proud of it in a way I haven't been about earlier stuff is that I feel like I—Whatever's hard in the book is in service of something that at least for me is good and important. And it's embarrassing to talk about because I think it sounds kind of cheesy. Um I—I—I sort of think like all the way down kind of to my butthole I was a different person coming up with this book than I was about my earlier stuff. And I'm not saying my earlier stuff was all crap, you know, but it's just it seems like I think when you're very young and until you've sort of uh you know, faced various darknesses, um it's very difficult to understand how—how You're welcome to cut all this out if this just sounds like, you know, a craft product or something.

The part about writing having to "evince some kind of innate investment to the reader that piques their genuine interests and intrigue” is my own interpretation of what I took from interviews between Wallace and Silverblatt on KCRW between 1996 and 2006. Skimming through the entire transcript I have (there’s a 2+ hour compilation of all the interviews on Youtube) this is probably a mixture of remarks made in 1996 (Infinite Jest) [1] and 1997 (A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) [2]. I vaguely remember a remark of his along the lines of the duty of a writer to ‘always let the reader know what the stakes are’. Or something like that.

Another quote from the 1996 interview in attempt to support my previous statements:

> [Fiction’s] got a very weird and complicated job because part of its job is to—is to—teach; Teach the reader, communicate with the reader, establish some sort of relationship with the reader where the reader is willing on a neurological level to expend effort; to look hard enough at the jellyfish to see that it's pretty. And—and that stuff's in that kind of effort is very hard to talk about and it's real scary because you can't be sure whether you've done it or not. And it's what makes you sort of clutch your heart when somebody says, I really like this...

My favorite one may be from the conversation they had in 2000:

> I—I think—I—I—I think somewhere in the late eighties or somewhere some at some point when that sort of minimalist fiction began to pass from vogue It wasn't that the class questions changed, it was that I think the class questions disappeared. And—and questions that were issues that were fundamentally about—about class and inclusion became more for people like maybe my age a little younger, questions of—of corporation, um corporations and consumers and consuming models versus kind of alternative uh homemade quote unquote non—non—corporate transactions. I don't know if this makes any sort of sense. Where I—I know for me a certain kind of smoothness, um, that you could th—that you can identify with resolution, easily identified kind of black and white um heroes and villains, um standard standardly satisfying endings involving the gratification of romance or, you know, epistemological problems. I associate with corporate entertainment whose—whose agenda is fundamentally financial, whose—some—some of and—some of it’s—some of it's quite good. Um but—but its fundamental—its fundamental orientation is um there —there's no—there's no warmth in it toward the reader or no attempt to involve the reader or the audience in a kind of relationship or interaction. It's a—it's a—it's a transaction of a certain kind of gratification in exchange for in exchange for money. [3]

[1] https://www.kcrw.com/shows/bookworm/stories/david-foster-wal...>

[2] https://www.kcrw.com/shows/bookworm/stories/david-foster-wal...>

[3] https://www.kcrw.com/shows/bookworm/stories/david-foster-wal...>

I don't think we need to credit him or reconcile anything, what he says is not wrong or hypocritical, it is just his view of what makes a good blog post. I disagree with him but the only consequence for him is that I won't read his blog unless I feel compelled to because I want to join in the discussion on somewhere like HN and don't want to be one of those people who interjects into a discussion on an article they did not read, even if the conversation is clearly about the title and not the article or marginally related topics or I simply want to make a marginally related comment.

For me, it is the way he presents and develops ideas that prevents me from reading, it reminds me of reading a tutorial on how to reach his conclusion. Some people probably like the style, some probably don't care about the style, and some like me struggle to even skim a short post like TFA. But I find a great deal of what is on the internet to be difficult to read and think nothing of reading a book like Infinite Jest in a week. I am not the target audience.

Edit: Fixed some editing weirdness, I think.

Oh no, will they elect a president who primarily operates in ragebait, heavily uses social media, and has no meaningful attention span for anything outside of receiving direct praise? Good thing we have such enlightened voters right now who would never for someone that!

I think I know the answer, but people don’t want to hear it. Gwern has a kind of formula/structure really effectively markets his blog to the HN audience, which is Not Bad Actually, just effective messaging + giving people what they want.

You can’t really separate the content from its medium, its contex, and its audience if you’re thinking about “why is this successful” (why does the medium express the content n a particular content that works for some particular audience). What the blog post is really about is not “writing” or creating good content per-se, but how to structure content for a blog-like/feed-based medium where you’re competing for clicks, views, attention, participation in external narratives, and relevancy/memorability with an audience mostly looking to be entertained or scratch some curiosity itch.

Gwern has a good formula for that which matched the HN context and audience:

1. Pique interest and grab attention. Give me a reason to click.

2. Let the reader in on the secret, you and me vs all these other idiots. Validate me.

3. Back it all up with sources/references and a post that articulates something the reader already was aware of but fundamentally agreed with. Teach me something but make me feel like “Finally someone who gets it” rather than challenged or threatened.

4. Do the work to actually deliver on the hook. Satisfy my curiosity and give me a reason to come back and share it.

None of this is even necessarily manipulative, it’s just the form that successfully competes in a click-driven market for attention and information (the context). Nobody has to click or read through or share or comment on the thing. Most likely very few will click through to the sources, but they might peep them or be interested to know that they exist. It’s very effective progressive disclosure.

The thing is, this audience REALLY does not want to believe that they can be marketed to or that their decision making is many ways pretty damn emotional/predictable. Gwern does an excellent job validating that for them AND successfully marketing to them anyway. I think that’s the part that’s missing from this post.

The context is completely non-captive, the audience wants to feel smart, and believes that they are “too smart to be marketed to”. Here they are scrolling through an attention market looking for interesting information that they need to be convinced to click, read through, share, and engage with. Why was the link shared and content created to being with, and how did it structure itself to fit its content/audience, and why does a particular structure/messaging work while others don't?

The word for all of that is Marketing. It's just a Good Thing when done right.

> Again, please, Does Gwern have anything that sounds as striking as “Empires Without Farms: The Case of Venice” or was that example a tacit hat tip to Brett Devereaux’s work?

I don’t quite see the link to Devereaux here. But, if anything, I think Devereaux is not at all similar to the writing style in the “Empire without farms” thing here. On ACOUP, he just bluntly tells you what the plan is and then executes it. He does engaging content and funny stuff, but it is sprinkled throughout the text rather than being a gimmicky hook to draw the reader in. For example,

https://acoup.blog/2026/01/16/collections-hoplite-wars-part-...

Starts out with one paragraph about where we are in the series of blog posts and a super zoomed out description of what the series is about.

Then a paragraph about the fact that he had been planning an alternative ordering for the blog posts. If I don’t already care, that’s not going to make me care.

Then we finally get a direct no-frills statement describing the specific question to be answered in this post. It’s blunt and it doesn’t ask a “get ready for a surprise” type question.

I like it. This is a confident and adult writing style. To me,

“Venice ruled half the Mediterranean. And yet… it had no farms. How do you have an empire without farms?”

Comes off as an author a trying to convince the reader that they have something clever to say. Almost always this is the result of worrying too much about style.

IMO, the best way to come up with a clever phrasing is to start by writing down a direct version first, to figure out what you really want to say. Then, just don’t write a clever phrasing, the reader will appreciate your respect for their time.