Introducing... REVISIONARIES
What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers
This Fall, I’m very excited to be publishing my first ever book of nonfiction, REVISIONARIES: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers.
It’s out from Quirk Books on 10/15, but you can preorder now!
REVISIONARIES is the culmination of seven years of research into more than twenty works by great writers—many forgotten, obscure, or totally lost. This book builds on my long-running “Unfinished Business” column at Electric Literature adding loads of new great literary mysteries, and also turning an eye outward towards what these strange works have taught me, and can teach us all, about the many hiccups, catastrophes, and crises that surround the creative process… even for the greatest geniuses to ever write.
Each chapter ends with a “Fail Like a Genius” writing exercise inspired by my research, perfect for getting our own messes-in-progress off the ground.
Soon, I’ll sharing links for educators interested in using the book in the classroom—if you are teaching a workshop, seminar, and may want to assign Revisionaries, please let me know and I can help you get ahold of an ARC.
Inside REVISIONARIES you’ll find chapters on works by:
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Louisa May Alcott, Vladimir Nabokov, Octavia Butler, Flannery O’Connor, Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Shirley Jackson, David Foster Wallace, Gustave Flaubert, Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Truman Capote, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Clarice Lispector, Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens…
And just for funsies, Michelangelo and Kurt Cobain.
REVISIONARIES is for anyone who loves great stories about great literature and for writers of all ages and at all points in their own creative process.
Here’s an excerpt from the introduction, just for you, my dear Substack readers. Thank you—and have fun!
REVISING GENIUS
When I was a young college student studying creative writing, I begged my way into a graduate-level English literature course called “Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway.” The class met in the clock tower of an old brick and marble building. Each week I climbed five flights of stairs to sit in a beautiful sky-blue room with huge windows that opened out over the century-old campus.
Twelve of us gathered there on Wednesdays for three hours around a long table to discuss some of the best novels ever written. Very quickly I realized I was in way over my head. Not only was I considerably younger than my classmates, not only had I read nearly nothing in my life compared to them, but I was not trained in formal literary theory at all. Unlike them, I was not a scholar but a writer, and I had enrolled in the course hoping to figure out one thing and one thing only.
Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. Would I ever become as good as them? Or had these three masters been gifted at birth with talents that I simply would never possess?
All I knew was that I had fallen blindly in love with writing. Growing up, I’d always enjoyed reading and entertained myself by scribbling little stories. I’d filled notebooks and floppy disks with weird attempts at novels and my own imaginary TV episodes. But in college, it all became much more. My creative writing classes were serious work. We were not playing around anymore. In that room, fiction was an art form. A craft. Short stories were miraculous constructions. Great novels changed people. The history of the world was marked not just by wars and governments, but by literary turning points and the movements that followed, or even led, the greatest thinkers of every civilization. Authors became never discussed how it had been done.
How many drafts did it take for James Baldwin to finish “Sonny’s Blues”? Did Truman Capote use an outline to organize Breakfast at Tiffany’s? Was it a good idea to write longhand and then type it up later? Or just dive straight into Microsoft Word? Should you carry around a notebook all the time to scribble down ideas, or was that pretentious?
After breathlessly discussing the perfection of many master works, we’d eventually turn to our own shambolic attempts at writing fiction. Silently, we’d sit there and be workshopped. For anyone who’s never had the pleasure, back then this meant that our instructor and peers talked at us, pointing out every character inconsistency, plot hole, awkward phrase, and lamentable word choice. After a lot of laughing and eye-rolling and insincere complaints, my pages would be returned to me, bathed in red ink, inevitably revealed to be a hopeless mess.
We hoped to emerge with thicker skins, the creative light inside us not wholly snuffed out, but this was a constant struggle.
There was praise in our workshops too, but I noticed that a writer’s successes were nearly always described as having been achieved effortlessly, because of something innate in them.
“You’ve got a great eye for detail!” a professor might say. “A real feel for the language!” Strong scenes were “lifelike” and great sentences “had a natural flow.”
When it was good, in other words, it was just good, and little was said about how it had gotten that way.
Once more it seemed that there was something innate in rare, genius writers that we either had or didn’t have, something that no amount of revision or practice could replace. Hoping to trick everyone into believing I was one of these talented few, I began finishing my workshop pieces a few days early and asking my girlfriend to give me feedback, so that I could patch up all the worst mistakes before our class met.
This worked. Steadily, I began to earn praise in class for my “sense of humor” and my “ear for dialogue.” Just one problem: I felt like I was cheating. No one knew I’d had to work so hard to get the humor and the dialogue right. If anyone ever saw my first drafts, I feared, they’d realize I was still a talentless hack. My determination rose, even as, after three years of workshops, I still had no idea if I was any good or not.
We celebrate the genius in both the arts and the sciences, the singular, brilliant mind that can do what everyone else has failed to accomplish: invent a light bulb, compose Symphony no. 40, see inside a black hole, write Hamlet, discover the electron. We lionize prodigies who perform with the philharmonic and then finish college before age ten. We speak of the “once-in-a-generation mind.” We uphold the myth of genius even as it reinforces the narrative that the rest of us will most likely fail unless we happen to share in their gifts.
Yes, we might read that a now-famous actress stumbled in auditions early on, or that a tech wizard flunked out of college before creating the app that made him a billionaire. We recognize that hard work and persistence are important to accomplishment. But these are billed as mere prologue to the massive success we already know has occurred. In retrospect we think they were always remarkable, just unappreciated at first.
Similarly, we are aware that we, and lots of people around us, work quite hard and still never reach great success in the end. Is it all luck? Or is there some X factor? Some genetic advantage, some divine gift, that separates the true stars from the rest?
This was why I’d talked my way into the Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway class. I hoped that if I took the hardest possible class about the very best of the best, then the secret to genius would at last be revealed.
It would be—just not in the way I expected.
Preorder at the links below, and stay tuned here for more news before 10/15!