Revisionaries

What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers

“A pocket-size book of wonders. . . . Both astute and empathetic.”—Wall Street Journal

Find creative inspiration in this fascinating rummage through the wastebaskets, secret diaries, and abandoned files of 20 literary superstars.


If you like to write—whether it’s a pastime, a passion, or a profession—you’ve probably found yourself reading something brilliant and thinking, “I could never do this! I might as well give up.” But if there’s one thing every great author has in common, it’s this: they’ve all written some hot garbage.

In Revisionaries, a writing expert takes you on an engrossing tour through the discarded drafts, false starts, and abandoned projects of influential writers. In the process, he dismantles some of our most deeply held—and most suffocating—ideas about what it takes to produce great creative work. You’ll learn that:


  • Franz Kafka lacked confidence
  • Octavia Butler had writer's block
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote bad drafts
  • Ralph Ellison got overwhelmed
  • Louisa May Alcott got off to a bad start
  • And more deep, dark secrets about the authors you most admire

Written by an award-winning novelist and creative-writing professor, Revisionaries is a compelling peek behind the scenes of genius for writers and readers alike.
Kristopher Jansma is the author of the novels Our Narrow Hiding Places, Why We Came to the City, and The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards. He is the winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the recipient of an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His short fiction, distinguished in The Best American Short Stories 2016, has been published in The Sun, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Story, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. Kristopher is an associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program at SUNY New Paltz College.
Geniuses Write Bad Drafts: F. Scott Fitzgerald

     Let me begin by saying that I still believe F. Scott Fitzgerald was a genius. It’s just that now instead of being awed by his “ear” or his “eye,” I’m amazed by the work he put into developing these abilities. I’m captivated by the author’s relentless planning and outlining, his systematic revising, and his thorough researching. He laboriously constructed systems that would help him produce a brilliant novel, systems that are both fascinating and useful to any writer. His genius was bigger than him alone and did not come from some divine or genetic source.
     To get a clearer sense of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last novel, I wanted to see more than what Bruccoli included in the 1993 reprinting we’d read in school. So I took a trip to Princeton University, where the original manuscript pages of The Last Tycoon are kept at the Firestone Library, along with the full collection of the associated notes and letters and outlines. These are free for anyone to access after making a request to the special collections librarians—which is remarkable, considering that these literary artifacts are global treasures and irreplaceable. Any of these documents might easily be held in a vault in some billionaire’s mansion, hidden from view like an auctioned Vermeer or Van Gogh. If you peruse the books and manuscripts department at Sotheby’s you’ll find similar items priced there at tens of thousands of dollars.
     And at the archive you aren’t admiring these works through a glass plate—no, you can touch (albeit gently) the actual pieces of paper that F. Scott Fitzgerald held in his hands, perhaps on the very day of his death. They are there to be studied, to allow us to get closer than ever to the genius himself.
     Box 27 contains the actual manuscript of The Last Tycoon.
     Inside it are five folders. The first contains a corrected typescript, covered in margin notes and copy edits. Folders 2, 3, and 4 contain hundreds of papers, everything from first draft pages written in longhand to typed-up versions of these pages that are heavily edited. In more than one case there is a note from Fitzgerald to keep only the parts underlined in red crayon, which leaves single lines, often only certain phrases, and very rarely an entire paragraph. “Unpleasant as hell except the end,” he writes to himself. “Break up. Copy the red.” On one page he simply notes in the margin, “all awful.”
     But was it so awful? Or was it just not yet great? To understand the whole story, we must rewind to the catastrophes preceding the final year of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life, and the way this novel almost saved him.
“A pocket-size book of wonders. . . . Both astute and empathetic.”—Wall Street Journal

“Aspiring novelists will be heartened.”—Publishers Weekly

About

“A pocket-size book of wonders. . . . Both astute and empathetic.”—Wall Street Journal

Find creative inspiration in this fascinating rummage through the wastebaskets, secret diaries, and abandoned files of 20 literary superstars.


If you like to write—whether it’s a pastime, a passion, or a profession—you’ve probably found yourself reading something brilliant and thinking, “I could never do this! I might as well give up.” But if there’s one thing every great author has in common, it’s this: they’ve all written some hot garbage.

In Revisionaries, a writing expert takes you on an engrossing tour through the discarded drafts, false starts, and abandoned projects of influential writers. In the process, he dismantles some of our most deeply held—and most suffocating—ideas about what it takes to produce great creative work. You’ll learn that:


  • Franz Kafka lacked confidence
  • Octavia Butler had writer's block
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote bad drafts
  • Ralph Ellison got overwhelmed
  • Louisa May Alcott got off to a bad start
  • And more deep, dark secrets about the authors you most admire

Written by an award-winning novelist and creative-writing professor, Revisionaries is a compelling peek behind the scenes of genius for writers and readers alike.

Author

Kristopher Jansma is the author of the novels Our Narrow Hiding Places, Why We Came to the City, and The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards. He is the winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the recipient of an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His short fiction, distinguished in The Best American Short Stories 2016, has been published in The Sun, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Story, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. Kristopher is an associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program at SUNY New Paltz College.

Excerpt

Geniuses Write Bad Drafts: F. Scott Fitzgerald

     Let me begin by saying that I still believe F. Scott Fitzgerald was a genius. It’s just that now instead of being awed by his “ear” or his “eye,” I’m amazed by the work he put into developing these abilities. I’m captivated by the author’s relentless planning and outlining, his systematic revising, and his thorough researching. He laboriously constructed systems that would help him produce a brilliant novel, systems that are both fascinating and useful to any writer. His genius was bigger than him alone and did not come from some divine or genetic source.
     To get a clearer sense of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last novel, I wanted to see more than what Bruccoli included in the 1993 reprinting we’d read in school. So I took a trip to Princeton University, where the original manuscript pages of The Last Tycoon are kept at the Firestone Library, along with the full collection of the associated notes and letters and outlines. These are free for anyone to access after making a request to the special collections librarians—which is remarkable, considering that these literary artifacts are global treasures and irreplaceable. Any of these documents might easily be held in a vault in some billionaire’s mansion, hidden from view like an auctioned Vermeer or Van Gogh. If you peruse the books and manuscripts department at Sotheby’s you’ll find similar items priced there at tens of thousands of dollars.
     And at the archive you aren’t admiring these works through a glass plate—no, you can touch (albeit gently) the actual pieces of paper that F. Scott Fitzgerald held in his hands, perhaps on the very day of his death. They are there to be studied, to allow us to get closer than ever to the genius himself.
     Box 27 contains the actual manuscript of The Last Tycoon.
     Inside it are five folders. The first contains a corrected typescript, covered in margin notes and copy edits. Folders 2, 3, and 4 contain hundreds of papers, everything from first draft pages written in longhand to typed-up versions of these pages that are heavily edited. In more than one case there is a note from Fitzgerald to keep only the parts underlined in red crayon, which leaves single lines, often only certain phrases, and very rarely an entire paragraph. “Unpleasant as hell except the end,” he writes to himself. “Break up. Copy the red.” On one page he simply notes in the margin, “all awful.”
     But was it so awful? Or was it just not yet great? To understand the whole story, we must rewind to the catastrophes preceding the final year of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life, and the way this novel almost saved him.

Praise

“A pocket-size book of wonders. . . . Both astute and empathetic.”—Wall Street Journal

“Aspiring novelists will be heartened.”—Publishers Weekly

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