In the study, I take an innovative effort to investigate "the inquiry practices of non-fiction writers." I am especially interested in how creative non-fiction gets made - a process that has often been either shrouded in complete mystery and attributed to the genius of an individual writer, or rendered as a work routine focused on drafts and/or editorial processes. There is little work that seeks to understand non-fiction writers as researchers themselves. I believe that in David Foster Wallace and in the papers recently made available to researchers via the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin that document his non-fiction work, I have identified a singular opportunity to explore the work of a brilliant researcher as well as writer. My work primarily falls in the realm of rhetorical analysis. In this project, I conduct a detailed analysis of materials in the DFW archive that others might well ignore who are "Wallace scholars." I sought out traces of Wallace's practice, indicators of where he worked - as a well-known writer of fiction - to keep his non-fiction essays anchored in experience, in fact, in emotion true-to-life, while maintaining the compelling narrative for which he is so well known. In the end, my work is not a literary biography or a derivation of that, as valuable as those works on Wallace might undoubtedly be. My work will instead reveal a portrait of a working writer that can be compared with others - nonfiction essayists, yes, but also other writers - bringing both clarity and perhaps some critique to the boundaries of work resulting from ethnographic research, investigative reporting, and a host of other similar genres that we perhaps more readily consider the products of "genuine" inquiry. These traces of inquiry - sources, if not "evidence" - are occluded or perhaps just lost for the reader of Wallace's nonfiction--in most creative writing. We occasionally hear references in the prose to those moments when, faced with an opportunity to stray from the facts he chose, instead, to consult some other text - an encyclopedia, perhaps, in "Consider the Lobster" - to tack back towards truth.
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