This post was originally published on Dead Darlings, a blog about novel writing run by alumni of GrubStreet's Novel Incubator program.

Feeling defeated by rejections from agents and/or editors? Feeling stuck with your writing, wondering if you’re just not good enough? You need to pick up a copy of Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers (Quirk Books, 2024), by novelist and creative writing professor Kristopher Jansma.

One of the most interesting writing books I’ve read in a while, Revisionaries gives us an inside look at the secret diaries, discarded drafts, and abandoned projects of authors considered by many to be literary superstars. In the process, Jansma dismantles some of our most deeply held—and most stifling—ideas about what it takes to produce great creative work. Whether you’re feeling in doubt about your own work or not, this book just might give you a new perspective and inspire you to keep going!

Tracey Palmer: I was in the throes of querying, feeling pretty down about the whole publishing thing, when I picked up your book. I’m glad I have this chance to tell you that it gave me renewed hope and inspiration. Did you have people like me in mind when you wrote Revisionaries or was there something else that sparked this book?

Kristopher Jansma: Yes, absolutely! In addition to writing fiction and nonfiction during the past 20 years, I’ve also been teaching writing the whole time. I tend to think of everything I’m writing through that lens. In the classroom, I try to give some inspiration and hope to my students so they won’t give up on their passion, but then I come home and, just like you, start banging my own head against the wall about getting rejections on stories and pitches. Only I don’t have a professor to visit in office hours anymore for a pep talk! So what I started to do instead was dig into the lives of my literary heroes and idols, thinking I might pick up on some tricks they knew that I didn’t… only what I found was that they also went through rejection, failure, and frustration, just like me. Yes, there are all these great works they’re so well known for, but also there are books that they tried to write which fell apart completely, or which they felt insecure about, or which got turned down by timid publishers… and that helped me enormously to see that I wasn’t somehow a terrible writer just because things didn’t fall magically into place for me every time I set out to work on something new. The struggle we’re going through is the norm, even for the very best authors who’ve ever written.

After reviewing the unpublished and not-so-great early works of “great” writers, you conclude that: Franz Kafka lacked confidence, Jane Austen often quit, and James Baldwin caved under pressure. And when you read an unfinished draft of F. Scot Fitzgerald’s last novel, it was “…a trainwreck. A total disaster. A hot, hot mess.” So, why are we convinced these authors were just born brilliant writers? And how does this belief keep us from pushing ahead with our own work?

There are a few things going on here. First, I think we read classic masterpieces like The Metamorphosis or Sense and Sensibility or The Great Gatsby in English classes and we get kind of blown away by how perfect they are. So that sets up this high standard—that there are some enduring works of genius out there—and in and of itself I think this is a good thing. It makes us ambitious and excited to make our own attempts. But what teachers won’t typically explain to students is how much labor and work and collaboration went into these masterpieces. We don’t hear that Kafka thought the end of The Metamorphosis was a mess and wished he’d been able to fix it somehow. We don’t hear that Austen had to step away from a bunch of other early failures for a decade before she was able to write her first novel. Or that Fitzgerald’s books relied on heavy-handed editing from others in his life. We’re left instead with this sense that these writers could simply perform magic and we can’t. Then, in a creative writing class, you hear a teacher tell someone that they have an “ear for dialogue” or a “great sense of imagery” or whatever, as if these are all inborn traits and not skills that we can develop through practice. All of it comes together to make us believe we either “have it” or don’t, and that’s just not the way it works. Great, genius writers only get that way because they work very hard to get that good, and because they have other people to assist them in getting there.

This book must have required a ton of research. The behind-the-scenes stories of the authors you include in the book are fascinating. Most of them, I’d never heard before—and I was an American Literature major! How did you go about the process of researching their “failures” and how did you decide which authors to include?

It was a lot of research, but very, very fun and rewarding to do. I was surprised to find that so many of these “lost” books were out there, because of course we don’t hear much about them usually. At first I thought I’d have to really hunt around for these, but soon I discovered that almost every writer I could think of has one (or more!) out there somewhere. I wound up with several that I didn’t include in Revisionaries, actually, like one about JD Salinger’s “Hapworth 16, 1924” or another about Alan Moore’s proposed follow-up to Watchmen. (Those are both available on Electric Literature’s site!) I wanted to focus on the well-known classic writers most of us know from high school or college reading lists, but also keep the list as diverse as I could so that a reader can see that these challenges are there, in different ways, for male writers, female writers, writers of color, writers from before the 20^th century, and writers from the US and from other countries. Ultimately, I tried to then focus on writers whose stories were somehow instructive for us. There had to be some lesson to learn from the saga of the lost work—and in most cases there were plenty!

In all your research, what was the most surprising bit of information you uncovered?

I think the most surprising case to me might have been Patricia Highsmith, whose work as a literary thriller writer I had loved for ages. The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train were so important to me as a younger writer. But I had never really thought much about why Highsmith focused on these murder stories, almost always about men. I knew she was a queer writer and that she had published the one book dealing explicitly with those themes, The Price of Salt, under a pseudonym, Claire Morgan. But I had never known why she’d never written more in that vein. Then I found out that she had tried writing a sequel to that book, The First Person Novel, but that she’d abandoned it not even 60 pages in. The only way to read it was to fly out to Switzerland to read the manuscript in the archives in Bern—so it took me a few years to get the grants to do it, but finally I was able to go out and read it for myself. And it was quite interesting and parts were very good! Sadly it really seemed that it was, to some degree, her own internalized homophobia that scared her off what might have been a very bold and personal project. At the same time I kind of respect the fact that she made a choice, as a writer, to avoid the confessional path, and instead rely on a kind of artistic suppression that channeled her discomfort into, well, characters like Tom Ripley. Not the healthiest way to be alive in the world, for sure, but a very valid and effective way of making art.

Is there an author you’ve come across that you think was actually born a genius writer?

I mean some of these writers clearly are just abnormally brilliant people—I can’t deny that there are things about, say, Vladimir Nabokov’s abilities with words (in at least three languages!) that still simply floor me. And he was born with a kind of innate ability others weren’t. His synesthesia, which he explained in his autobiography, Speak, Memory, gave him textural and color associations with letters and sounds that I think must have influenced the musical way he wrote. But—even there, you still find that Nabokov was relentless in his practices as a writer, a translator, even a scientist! Even with whatever gifts he had, and I do think all these “geniuses” had them—even with all that, he still had to work very, very hard, and did not always succeed. I think it isn’t necessarily that there’s no such thing as “talent” but just that, as James Baldwin said, “Talent is insignificant.” Talent might open certain doors for some of us, but how far we go beyond that point is up to us, and, by Baldwin’s reading, our “discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.”

Amen to that! So, I found Revisionaries not only super interesting, but also useful. You don’t merely leave us with examples of how these famous authors struggled, but at the end of each chapter, you give us great practical tips on how to improve our own writing and writing process based on their “failures”. I guess since you’re a writing teacher at heart, you couldn’t help but give us short homework prompts and assignments!

Hah, yes! I wanted this to be the sort of book that could be of practical use at home, but also one that a teacher might bring into a classroom and use as a textbook or resource that way. I’m in the midst of teaching a workshop now, in fact, where we’re using Revisionaries and these prompts as weekly inspirations, and to that end I’ve also put up a free model syllabus for any educators out there, outlining how it might be used in a classroom setting. Many of those prompts are inspired by things I have been doing in my own workshops for a long time now, like the “Nest of Ninnies” collaboration, and others are things I stumbled upon in the research process that I’ve adopted in my own writing practices, such as keeping a Commonplace Book.

As someone suffering through the agony of querying for the past two years, I found comfort and encouragement in what you wrote about rejections: “…rejections don’t mean that we’re deficient, or awful, or talentless. It may mean that we’re ahead of our time. Or it may simply mean that our best idea is waiting just around the corner, waiting for us to keep looking for it.” Can you talk a bit more about this?

Gladly! It’s absolutely the worst part of the process, no doubt about it. I used to think that rejection was just something you had to deal with when you were starting out, and that after a point you would then have an agent and an editor who would simply bypass it all for you. Turns out that’s not true at all. As I went into the launch event for my last novel, I got a form rejection email for a story I’d sent out ten months earlier and never heard back about. After my second book was published, it took me eight years to get another one out. I’m sure it’ll look like I just worked really, really hard on this new one—but the truth is that in those eight years I wrote two other books that simply didn’t sell. Both were rejected by more than a dozen editors, and both involved months of just waiting and hoping in agony.

Recently I sold a short story that had been turned down by 20 other literary magazines first… I had it on submission for three years! It just sucks! There’s no way to sugar coat it. But two things have helped me keep going in those times—the first is that I’ve now had the experience of being on grant committees and things, and have gotten to see firsthand just how much amazing material gets turned down for somewhat arbitrary reasons, not least of which is just that there only so many grants to give, only so many places publishing new fiction, etc. So a “no” doesn’t mean you’re awful, it just means you haven’t gotten through yet. The second thing that helped reassure me in all that was reading about writers like Harper Lee, or Richard Wright—both certified geniuses if ever there were any—who wrote books that were turned down by publishers (Go Set a Watchman, and The Man Who Lived Underground.) Not because they were so bad, but because the editors suspected they could do better… and you know what? They could, and they did.

Staying true to our blog name, were there any Dead Darlings—authors or stories you had to cut from the book? Who didn’t make it and why?

Yes! A few I mentioned before, but one other I was especially sad to lose, the Japanese writer Osamu Dazai, who wrote the novel No Longer Human, which has had a surprising recent streak of popularity—partly, apparently driven by the fact that there’s a popular anime, Bungo Stray Dogs, where a character is named after Dazai! In any case, he started writing this very funny book called Goodbye shortly before he died, with the premise that this lothario with too many mistresses is trying to figure out how to break up with them all without hurting anyone, and so he hires a woman to pretend to be his wife so he can bring her around to scare the others away… he didn’t get very far with it, sadly, because he died of suicide, very young. It was, I think, his fourth attempt at it… he was a deeply troubled man, although somehow for me that makes the sense of humor he brought to that last book even more remarkable. At any rate, his story is a downer, to say the least, and it isn’t especially instructive for a would-be writer either—I already had a chapter about David Foster Wallace where I was able to talk about mental health and writing—so we ended up cutting Dazai. I think it was very much for the best! However, I will end up publishing it soon as a standalone column for Electric Literature, so anyone who wants to read up on his tale can do it there.

I love how you end the book by encouraging all of us to discover or rediscover the joy of writing. Thank you for that! Do you have any other words of wisdom or encouragement for all the aspiring novelists like me?

Absolutely! I wholeheartedly believe that joy and fun are at the heart of great writing. Even when we are reading sad, tragic novels, I think we can sense on a gut level if the writer enjoyed writing it or not, and that affects my own enjoyment of it too. As we’ve covered, this can be such a frustrating and even isolating job, so it’s understandable that we all get a bit tired of those parts of the work from time to time… that “endurance” Baldwin talked about can be very elusive! But I find that if I step away, focus on enjoying what I can enjoy in my life and in the writing process, the other stuff feels less stifling soon enough and I can get on with the fun stuff again. I think the best way to do it is to remember that we aren’t doing it alone—we’re collaborating with other writers as we share inspirations and ideas, as we read their work, as we sympathize with their failures, and in that way I think we all get to both enjoy the work more and endure in it together.

Revisionaries is out October 15. Pre-order your copy here.

Kristopher Jansma is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels, OUR NARROW HIDING PLACES (Ecco, 2024) WHY WE CAME TO THE CITY (Viking, 2016), and THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS, (Viking, 2013). He is the winner of the 2014 Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award and his story “The Samples” is the winner of a 2021 Pushcart Prize. His work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Czech, and Korean. He writes a column for Electric Literature about Unfinished Business, and the fates and afterlives of authors’ incomplete works. His writing has also been published in The New York Times, ZYZZYVA Magazine, The Sun, Prairie Schooner, Chicago Quarterly Review, Slice Magazine, Salon, Real Simple, The Millions, and elsewhere. He holds a BA in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University and an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. He is an associate professor of English and director of Creative Writing at SUNY New Paltz College. He lives in New York with his wife and children.