‘Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers’
By Kristopher Jansma
Quirk Books, 320 Pages

This indispensable book is for readers and writers who want to learn about how great writers work, and don’t work, or seem not to work as they make notes, scribble on index cards, correspond about their difficulties, and assemble, disassemble, and tear up drafts and start again — sometimes never completing their books. 

Mr. Jansma makes excellent use of biographers’ investigations into writers’ lives, but he also does his own archival research, drawing on his experience as a writer. At the end of each chapter, he offers practical advice on how to keep going, overcoming doubts and accidents, using what he has learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vladimir Nabokov, Jane Austen, and more than a dozen other artists, including Michelangelo and Kurt Cobain.

The chapters on Fitzgerald and Nabokov are fascinating disquisitions on what to do with the fragments, notes, outlines, sketches, and other materials left behind for their unfinished novels, “The Love of the Last Tycoon” and “The Original of Laura.”

Mr. Jansma does not merely examine the works at hand but the writers’ personalities, methods of working, and how they represented work that was unfinished. In the cases of Fitzgerald and Nabokov, the editors of the incomplete novels made great claims for them that Mr. Jansma discounts.  What interests him is the struggle to produce great work, and how Fitzgerald and Nabokov went about the first stages of conceiving what they could not complete.

Fitzgerald kept a kind of log of sentences, sayings, and bits of prose that he had discarded in multiple drafts but nonetheless preserved and sometimes reused in “The Love of the Last Tycoon.” Mr. Jansma suggests we can learn from this process of disposal and recovery and apply similar practices to our own work as writers, or to our understanding as readers that so-called greatness is not simply a matter of inspiration, or even of hard work, but a willingness to go on garbage detail to discover what is precious in the refuse.

Sometimes, though, an initial draft is never going to work out, no matter what the techniques of revision; and so Jane Austen abandoned a whole novel and James Baldwin, after only a few pages, realized he probably would never be able to deliver the nonfiction work for which he had been paid an advance of $200,000.

Mr. Jansma’s chapter titles tell the tale: “Geniuses Lack Confidence” (Kafka); “Genuises Get Blocked” (Octavia Butler); “Geniuses Struggle (But Not Because They’re Genuises)” (David Foster Wallace); “Geniuses Bite Off More Than They Can Chew” (Ralph Ellison). Many more await the reader, including Harper Lee, Virginia Woolf, and Truman Capote.

The chapter on Sylvia Plath, “Geniuses Still Have to Do the Dishes,” is impressive. Mr. Jansma clarifies the history of the novels (available only in fragments) that Plath began working on after completing “The Bell Jar.” I’ve never seen a clearer description of what remains of those ruins — better than you will find in any Plath biography. 

Along the way, Mr. Jansma relates his own experience in writers groups, and why they matter, even though certain members of those groups can sidetrack a writer who loses his voice, or her sense of work that others try to fit into their preconceptions. 

What is moving about this book is its underlying truth that nothing need ever be completely lost, or simply viewed as unfinished. Baldwin could not write his book about the civil rights movement and his friendships with Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., worrying that his despair would injure the children of those men. The brief bits of that book that Baldwin did write, however, became a focal point of an award-winning documentary about him. 

The very concept of “greatness” gets a workout in this book, which answers those who complain when an artist’s incomplete work is published — as if such publication is unfair. Not at all, Mr. Jansma declares in his Epilogue: “Geniuses: They’re Just Like Us!”

In the end, in other words, genius is not a set-aside category, and great work does not just emerge from great minds. That’s why literature is called work.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography.”