How Ordinary Drafts Become Extraordinary Books. Revisionaries With Kristopher Jansma

How can we avoid the mistake of comparing our first drafts with the finished books we love? How can we improve our manuscripts? Kristopher Jansma gives his tips.

In the intro, Finding your deepest reason to write [Ink In Your Veins]; London Book Fair, AI audio and ‘vibe coding' [Self Publishing with ALLi]; Pirated database of books used to train AI models [The Atlantic]; Fair use and copyright with Alicia Wright; The Guardian strategic partnership with OpenAI; Trump Administration’s AI Action Plan and potential around fair use [Ars Technica]; How to Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed by Richard Susskind; Death Valley, A Thriller by J.F. Penn.

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Kristopher Jansma is the award-winning author of literary fiction novels, short fiction and essays, as well as Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• The mistake of comparing first drafts to finished works
• Dismantling the notion of genius
• How to turn our manuscripts into masterpieces
• Knowing when it's time to walk away from a book, or push through and persevere
• Seeking support from editors and friends
• Balancing the joyful side and business side of being an author
• The importance of social media in developing your personal brand
• Drawing boundaries and protecting personal information in your writing

You can find Kristopher at KristopherJansma.com or The Nature of the Fun on Substack.

Transcript of Interview with Kristopher Jansma

Joanna: Kristopher Jansma is the award-winning author of literary fiction novels, short fiction and essays, as well as Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers. So welcome to the show, Kris.

Kristopher: Thanks for having me on, Jo.

Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you about this. First up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing.

Kristopher: Well, I have been a writer pretty much my whole life. I'm one of those writers who, as a child, you couldn't get a book out of my hand. I have a whole storage unit somewhere full of school journals that are full of little stories and things. It was just something that I took to really early and always really wanted to do.

As I got older, I started taking it a little more seriously. Then I went to school eventually and studied writing. So it's always been a lifelong love of mine.

Joanna: So are you a full-time writer? We're always interested in how people make a living writing on this show.

Kristopher: I don't know very many full-time writers, sadly. So I'm an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY New Paltz College here in New York State.

So I'm teaching creative writing, which is wonderful because I get to talk about what I love all the time and help students with their writing. I'm the director of our creative writing program up there right now.

Joanna: Well, that's fantastic. It makes me understand a lot more why you wrote this book, Revisionaries. So let's get into that. Why is it sort of just a number one mistake of writers, which is comparing our first draft efforts to the finished books we read?

Why is comparing our first drafts to the finished books we read a mistake?

Kristopher: I think it's natural, but I think it's a mistake. I mentioned before, I was a big reader as a child and all through my life, and I think that's how most writers get started.

We fall in love with books at some point, and reading, and I think it's pretty natural at some points to start to wonder if we could do it too. You know, how much fun it would be to do and give somebody else the great experience that we've just gotten.

We model our efforts on the things that we've read before and the things that we admire, of course. Then a funny thing starts to happen, of course, as we get more serious about it, and —

We start to realize there's a huge gap between what we're able to do and what our heroes have done in the past.

Then I think a lot of people, after having a lot of fun with it at first, start to get really frustrated because they feel like, okay, well, what's the point if I'm never going to be as good as someone like F Scott Fitzgerald. In my case, he was like my hero growing up, or JD Salinger, or somebody like that.

I think what we miss, what most of us don't really learn much about, is that those writers only achieve these kind of great masterpieces after tons of failure, rejection, screw ups, mistakes. A lot of them had a lot of help from other people, like editors and family, and all of that.

So I think then we just have this misconception about how it works. What I think we tend to believe is that there are just certain people who luck out in the genetic lottery or something, and they're just naturally gifted, talented writers, and that they're geniuses from day one.

That was really what I wanted to try to dismantle in this book, was this idea that these great writers—not that they're not geniuses, not that they're not so great—but just that it's not all natural.

They didn't get there on their own, and it didn't come without a lot of failure along the way.

Joanna: As you were talking now, I was thinking about also the difference. I mean, as an associate professor in creative writing, you naturally teach—well, maybe you have to teach—specific books, things that are considered classic. There are books that are considered classics.

I almost feel this is another problem is that we compare ourselves to the classics. Whereas take someone like Isaac Asimov, who wrote over 400 books, people always compare themselves to the ones that were most successful. Whereas most books are not those classics, are they?

Could we compare ourselves to normal books instead of these ‘classics'?

Kristopher: Absolutely. I talk about this a little bit in the introduction to Revisionaries. I took a class when I was in college, but I snuck into a graduate class, and we read Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. It was all these amazing works by amazing American writers.

I talked about in the book this lesser known work of Fitzgerald that he didn't finish before he died, called The Love of the Last Tycoon, and realizing it was actually pretty bad.

I was finding it kind of depressing at the time, but then realizing later in life that actually that is something that was good. In my mind, I was able to realize, okay, this shows that even somebody that could write The Great Gatsby might write another book that's not so wonderful.

Then, of course, and I did mention this in the introduction, but I think of this a lot. With Faulkner, we started with and the Sound and the Fury, and I didn't know for years and years after that that wasn't his first novel. I thought it was his debut book.

A friend of mine said, “Oh, if you're ever feeling intimidated, go read one of Faulkner's first two novels.” I think it's Mosquitoes and Soldier's Pay or something, and he said, “You'll feel a lot better about your own writing,” and he was right.

Joanna: Yes, I think that's important. Now, you did mention the word “genius”, and you use it in the book to anchor each chapter, but genius is a really hard word. I mean, it's a word many people are uncomfortable with, and I think it's interesting.

Why did you choose the word “genius”, and how did your definition change over the process of writing?

Kristopher: I'm glad you mentioned that. Each chapter has a little section called “Fail Like a Genius” at the end that kind of gives you some tips on writing, or exercises you can do that are inspired by the chapter.

The word genius was floating around for me in the very beginning because what I was wanting to do, I realized, was dismantle the notion of genius. As you mentioned, it is such a problematic idea.

As I was mentioning before, if we see other people who are successful, we can just tell ourselves, “Oh, they're just a genius. They were born with some talent or some ability that other people aren't. I'll never succeed because I don't have that thing.”

I think that's where a lot of us begin the writing process, and that this idea that we're trying to figure out if we have what it takes somewhere within us. When the reality is —

What it takes is a lot of persistence, a lot of practice, a lot of stubbornness.

Also mixed in, and I think this is where it gets hard, an ability to learn from your mistakes and see where you've gone wrong, and then make corrections the next time.

When you look at these stories of these writers, you realize that this is what they've done as well. It's not like they just sat down one day wrote a masterpiece because they have some magical abilities that you or I don't.

Joanna: This is what kind of annoys me with writing, compared to something like visual art. So here in Europe, if you go to Malaga, you can go to the Picasso's early museum where he was born. You can see some of the pieces that he did when he was a child and then when he was a young man, and you can see the development.

In visual art, they appreciate the development of the artist, and also have this idea of periods.

Like, that's the blue period, then that was this, as visual artists experimented. It wasn't like, oh, they suddenly arrive on the scene with a perfect novel, which seems to be the expectation. Even now in modern publishing, it's like, “oh, this debut author.”

I guess we don't have this “show your work” thing in writing, do we? We don't really accept that.

Kristopher: No, we hide those drafts, and we hope that nobody ever sees them because we want to perpetuate this myth that we did just sit down and this wonderful thing came out. There's this mystique around the writer that way.

Debut writers are often fairly young, and you haven't read anything else by them before, so it creates this sense that they just decided to write a book one day, and then this great thing came out. So that's a hard thing to live up to.

A lot of debut authors don't end up publishing a second book, I think because the expectations are so high that the second book will be just as seemingly effortless to do as the first one was. Where, in fact, the first one probably took a decade, sometimes longer, of a sort of effort.

I had the same thought about the visual art as I was working on this book, and music too. Collectors will get demo tapes and rough tracks of artists that they love, and they enjoy going back and listening to the rawer sound of an early version of a song before it got all produced and polished and everything else.

There's something really authentic and cool and fun about that, to be able to hear this is what it sounded like when he was just in the garage with the guitar and the drum machine or whatever. With writing, we tend not to do that.

What we have instead, which is almost, I think, more problematic—I talk about this a little bit in the chapter in the book about Louisa May Alcott with Little Women—what we have instead is, every once in a while, publishers will put out a new book that they say they've discovered by a writer that was never published before.

What it turns out to be is what we would in academic worlds call like juvenilia, or here's a short story that Hemingway wrote when he was eight years old, or something like that, and published in the local newspaper.

They're often quite bad, or they're fine, I'm sure, for an eight year old, but nothing like what they're going to be able to do later. But the publishers, I think, wanting to kind of trick people into believing that they've discovered some new masterpiece that no one's ever read before.

They'll hype it up, and they'll say, “Okay, this is an amazing book by Louisa May Alcott that you've never read before,” and it turns out to be it's a book that she wrote and realized wasn't very good, and so she never published it.

Joanna: Didn't they do that with Harper Lee?

Kristopher: Yes, Harper Lee's story is one that I really love. I talk about this one in the book as well. This, again, was a very confused roll out by the publisher. They claimed that they had a long, lost second novel by Harper Lee, and it made it sound like it was a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird.

The new book was called Go Set a Watchman. When it came out, it was very shocking because it involves characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus and Scout and all of them, but as older characters. So it did seem like something that she wrote later about what would happen to them after To Kill a Mockingbird.

People were very scandalized because it turned out that Atticus Finch, who in To Kill a Mockingbird was the snowball lawyer who takes on this case to defend a Black man from the mob. Anyway, in this sort of sequel, he turned out to be like a racist and like a Ku Klux Klan member, or had gone to meetings or something.

People were horrified. How could this happen? How could she write this book about him? What it turned out had happened, finally, we worked it backwards, and we've discovered that that book was actually not even really a prequel.

It was a rough draft, or you couldn't even really call it a rough draft. It was a book that she wrote before To Kill a Mockingbird. She wanted to write about this woman, and she came up with these characters.

When she submitted that book to her publisher, their publisher said, basically, “No, thank you. I don't like this book, but I do like this character, and I do like this world in Alabama that you're writing about. So if you want to go back and write a completely different book now, I would take a look at that.”

So that's the moment when most writers would say, “Okay, this is a sign. I obviously don't have what it takes. I got so far, and this editor still said no, then sent me back to the drawing board again.”

That's, I think, when a lot of people would sort of give up, but Harper Lee had that persistence where she said, “Okay, great. There are a couple of things here that this editor said she liked. I'm going to go back, I'm going to start over. I'm going to take those elements, and I'm going to work with them.”

Then she wrote one of the greatest novels in the 20th century. So she was just so close to it, she just didn't know yet that that's where she was going with it.

Joanna: But then, classic example of someone who then didn't write. I mean, I write a lot of books, and I feel like every time I write a book, more ideas come.

I just can't imagine stopping writing. Maybe Harper Lee had a paralysis of success or something.

Kristopher: I wonder about that with her. She talked a lot in her interviews afterwards that it was so successful, and she got so much attention, and I don't think she was somebody that particularly desired that kind of attention.

It's a funny thing, a lot of writers—maybe there's some ego to it—we want to share our thoughts and ideas with people, and we think that others should hear or would enjoy them, at least. But we're not really necessarily people that want to be in the spotlight.

Being a writer is an art form that really has to be done alone for the most part.

A lot of writers are pretty introspective and kind of quiet people who wouldn't mind sitting alone at their computer for hours and hours and hours.

So I think Harper Lee and JD Salinger. I didn't end up talking about Salinger in this book, but I wrote an earlier column about him. I think they had that response to the fame that followed their books coming out, that they sort of retreated away from it.

We do know that Harper Lee worked on at least one other project after To Kill a Mockingbird. She was working on a crime novel. So it was sort of a true crime novel or based on a true crime that had happened. That's never been published.

I don't think she finished it, or at least we don't know that she's finished it. It's never been published, as far as we know. When they found Go Set a Watchman, originally that's what they thought they had found, was the finished crime novel. I don't believe that she ever did finish it.

Joanna: Yes, it's interesting. All right. Well, let's go a bit deeper into how we can turn our books into something better. You have a good quote in the book. You said, “I've seen how messes metamorphosize into masterpieces.”

So how can we do the same thing? Like, when you have students and they're like there's something in there, but it's a bit of a mess—

What are some ways we can improve our manuscripts?

Kristopher: There's a couple of things that came up over and over again in the book, and there's sort of a persistence theme that runs through several of the chapters.

Like with Harper Lee, where sometimes what needs to happen is that we just need to kind of stick with the project a little longer and try something else there and see how that works.

So sometimes that's how the mess turns into a masterpiece. It's just that we continue to dig in deeper and have some faith that we'll get there, trying out some different ideas along the way.

I think a lot of times for most writers, we get to a place where we've done everything we know how to do, and it's still quite a bit of a mess. I think that's when it helps a lot to get some help, basically. This also comes up over and over again.

So a lot of these writers had people in their lives that they were able to turn to for advice, or just to be a helper, a reader. F Scott Fitzgerald's first version of The Great Gatsby, Trimalchio, was not nearly as good as The Great Gatsby, for a number of reasons, and also had a horrible title.

He got it as far as he could on his own. At that point, he had an editor that he'd worked with on his first book, and Max Perkins read it and gave him some feedback on it that was really helpful. He also needed the help of his wife, Zelda, who gave him some ideas about how to better define Gatsby as a character.

So that's another thing that I often recommend, which is —

Is there anybody that you can give the book to that might be able to give it a fresh read?

Then the important thing is then you need to be open to the feedback that they give you.

[Click here for editors!]

I think a lot of times we give the book to somebody, and we hope that they're going to tell us it's perfect. That always feels good, but it's not going to really help us get it where we need it to go.

Kafka, I talk about Kafka in the book, never finished any of the books that he started writing. He always undermined himself and had all this doubt, but luckily, he had a good friend, Max Brod, who had basically pushed him all the time to keep on going and try to finish things. So I think that helps a lot, like bringing it to somebody else.

Then the last thing I would say—this came up a few times too—it's sort of the flip side of persistence, in some ways.

Sometimes you need to know how to walk away from a project that just isn't working.

It's very hard. Of course, we spent a lot of time on these books, sometimes years, and we just can't get it to work right.

I really wanted people to see through the project here, through Revisionaries, that this happens to all the writers that they love as well. They work on a project that just can't, for whatever reason, doesn't come together the way that they wanted to.

The best thing they can do is take a step away from it and just start trying to work on something different for a while.

Joanna: But as you said about Kafka there, like I know someone who has 15 books that are not finished. The thing is, sometimes, like you say, you might need to walk away, but maybe you actually just need to go for a walk and walk away for a week and then come back and finish it.

If you keep walking away from projects because it's hard—I mean, the point is, this is hard.

It is hard to write a book. How do you know where's the balance between persisting or walking away?

Kristopher: Yes, it is hard.

I wish there was an easy way to know when you're in too deep on something that just isn't working. I was just reading this the other day, Mark Twain, prolific writer, finished lots and lots of things, and wrote wonderful classics.

He tried to write a book about Joan of Arc, I think he said six times in 12 years, and every time he got into it and just realized he wasn't going to be able to finish it. It wasn't going to be able to get any further.

When you're in a situation like you're talking about, where you have somebody who never finishes anything, or starts many things and never finishes them, I do think that is a different problem.

With Kafka, it was an issue of just a lack of confidence. He would finish something and then he would rethink it and decide, “Oh no, no, no, actually, I don't think it's good enough. I have to go back and change it again,” even when other people were telling him, “No, no, no, it's great. Let's go.”

Kafka tried to claw back the manuscript for The Metamorphosis, probably his most famous short story, probably one of the most famous short stories in the 20th century. He tried to get his editor to send it back to him so that he could keep making more changes to it, even right before it got published.

So that is a different kind of problem that comes up sometimes where you're just never satisfied with what you've done. You have to be able to decide, “Okay, this is good enough the way it is. I'm going to let it go and move on to the next thing.”

Joanna: Yes, and so often—well, I mean, obviously sometimes there are some big structural problems, but that is what editors can help with—but often it's the little tweaks. I mean, we all read our work that's published, and we're like, “Oh, I would change that now. I would change that now,” but—

It's probably not even something that a reader would notice or care about.

Kristopher: Exactly. I think though, again, as writers, we're always going to have some self-doubt, and we're always going to be, to some degree, our own worst critic. We also have to balance that out against the moments where we feel optimistic and we feel like what we're writing is actually good.

This is, again, kind of a moment when I think having somebody else on the outside give you a pat on the back and some encouragement is helpful.

Jane Austen was a great example of someone. She wrote a few books when she was young, like very young, 16, 17,18 years old. They were finished, and she thought they were good, and other people that read them liked them, but she just wasn't sure. She felt like they weren't as good as she wanted them to be.

Then one of them she waited on for about a decade almost, I think, and then eventually wrote it completely and turned it into, I think it was Sense and Sensibility.

She had a sense that she had more to learn, or she needed more time to become a better writer first before she wanted to put that work out there.

Joanna: Yes, I think we do get that sense. I wrote a book on the shadow, Writing the Shadow, using Jungian psychology. That took a couple of decades, really, before I was ready to do that. I had to write a memoir first, because memoir changes your writing, and then I was like, okay, now I'm ready to write that book.

Kristopher: Yes, it is hard. Although I think when you love the process of it, and you can get to a place where you're enjoying the writing part a lot, that that can be very freeing. Then you're not as concerned about, you know, okay, which one happens first? Or how does this get done before that one? That kind of thing.

Joanna: It's interesting. You said, “enjoying the writing.” In the book, you say, “Take the time to write for its own sake again.” I feel like this kind of simple joy is difficult. I mean, I'm a full time author, and many listeners write for a living, and it's like the industry drives us into faster output.

Publishers don't put as much editing into things as they did back in the day of those classic authors. We have to do a lot more marketing. You're on the show, you are doing book marketing, not writing. So how can we do this?

How can we balance taking the time to do that joyful stuff and the business of being a writer?

Kristopher: Yes, this is, I think, really the biggest key for writers today. Like you say, I don't know that it was as big of a struggle for writers in the past because this world of self-promotion that exists for writers today.

Even 10-20 years ago, I don't know that it was quite as all absorbing as it can be now in this landscape of social media, but also wonderful things like podcasts that I find really fun to do.

We started this by asking about, how can we keep fun alive in our writing? I think I enjoy talking to people about what I'm working on. It actually helps me think about what I want to write next and gets me excited to write more. So I try to keep that in mind as I'm doing these promotional engagements and things like that.

I don't feel like it is, or I try not to feel like it's a distraction from the writing itself. At the same time, eventually, you have to be able to log off of Instagram or TikTok or whatever.

You have to actually sit down and write and not feel distracted by the desire to go back in and check and see if anyone else is talking about you or responding to your video or something like that.

So I've started setting up a time in my day when I can turn off all those devices, when I can turn off social media, when it's just me and the computer. That's something that I've had to really push hard for the last couple of years to really carve out time away from the rest of it.

Different writers have different ways of doing this. If there's a room in your house that you can go into and you can leave the phone on the outside, or you can use a computer that's not online, I think those things can help a lot.

I set modest goals for writing.

Usually, my goal is to do something like 3000 words in a week, which sounds like a lot, but ultimately is maybe like 500 words a day. Maybe a little more during the work week, which doesn't take all that long to do in the course of a day, but it really adds up over time.

Over the course of a couple of weeks, you start to really feel like you've made some progress, finished a chapter or story that way. I think when you can build that into your life, this separate time that's sacred from the other parts of being a writer, the other business of being a writer, I think that's really the key.

I often talk about with my students —

There are times when you have to take off the writer hat and put on your author hat.

The author is the one who is on the podcast, who is talking to readers on social media, kind of doing that part of the job. Then the writer is almost like a separate identity.

Joanna: I'm not really into golf, but we're watching the Netflix series on golf at the moment, and it's mainly about characters, it's not so much about golf. They're excellent at their commentaries.

These young golfers were talking about how much they have to do social media in order to build up their brands. I was like, oh my goodness, it's the same for everyone now. Golf is what they do, like we do writing, and then they still have to do social media and all that.

It feels like this is just the reality of being some kind of personal brand now. You have to do that side of it.

So as part of teaching your students, that is what you tell them, right? It's not just the writing.

Kristopher: Yes, so we talk about it a lot. It's funny, my students, some of them are very online and really enjoy all of those things, and they're excited about that part of it.

To some degree, I almost worry more about those students because they're the ones who I suspect that I don't know that they really want to write, I think they want to be famous.

I try to tell them in as nice a way as possible, if what you want is to be famous, there are better ways to go about it than writing, probably more lucrative ways too.

So I do try to make sure that they remember that it is important, but it's not as important as actually writing something good and taking the time to master the craft that you're trying to master.

I think there's an idea out there, another myth maybe that needs to kind of get dispelled, which is that the brand is more important than the writing. We've all picked up a book by a flashy author, and felt like the writing wasn't all that good.

I think that leads to this idea that, okay, well maybe that part's just not as important, creating a persona that people want to follow on online. Again, the reality is that I don't think that that works for most people.

There are always great examples of writers who are quite successful and really don't have a strong social media presence at all, and are still able to do it.

So I try to remind them that it's fine to be excited about that side of things, and if you're good at it, then you should go ahead and do it, but that it's not a shortcut to succeeding in the writing part of it. In fact, I think it's often a distraction.

Joanna: Yes, there's definitely pros and cons. You actually have a chapter on keeping secrets, and you do write there about where's the line between what we do share. I mean, I podcast because I don't really do much social media.

Podcasting is one way that I can be a brand and sell books, but also share some things, but there are lines that I don't cross with my own brand. So what are your thoughts on when we share, when we stay silent, or even in our writing—

When do you write your truth, and when do you keep it quiet?

Kristopher: This is something that is funny. I think fiction writers, like myself, I was really drawn to fiction early on, partly because I felt like my own life wasn't all that interesting. So I thought it'd be better writing in a way that I can make things up.

Since I've gotten older, I've felt the other way around about it. There are things in my life now that I feel this need to protect, that I don't want to share with other people.

As a fiction writer, I have that option. I can always kind of hide things, or I can change them in such a way that there's still an element of privacy around them.

This comes up in Revisionaries in the chapter on Patricia Highsmith, who was a very prolific crime writer and wrote some fantastic novels. The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Price of Salt, etc., that are still classics today.

What I found was that she had tried a few times to write about her personal life. She was a lesbian, and she was having relationships with women in the West Village as openly as she could at the time, but she was living in a time when writing openly about lesbian relationships could have actually gotten her in legal jeopardy.

It certainly could have ruined her publishing career. Publishers weren't able to publish stories about those kinds of relationships unless they ended in tragedy, because otherwise, it was considered immoral.

So one of her great victories was writing The Price of Salt, which is a novel about these two women, and the relationship at the end is not really a tragedy at all, or arguably is a happy ending. She couldn't publish it under her own name. She published it under a pseudonym, which was a common practice at the time.

It was really difficult for her, personally. She almost fell apart completely in the lead up to it because she was so worried about the exposure that might come from it. The more that it seemed like the book was about to become a big hit, and then it was, the more that she felt like she had just shared way too much.

I ended up reading another book of hers, I had to fly all the way to Switzerland to go to the library and the archives there to dig up an unfinished book that she tried to write about that was also a woman reflecting on her life and her relationships with women in her life.

She abandoned the book after, I think, about 80 pages, and just realized that she just can't do it. She couldn't write about it. It was tearing her up. So I kind of think, and I talk about this in this chapter, that we have to be able to draw those same lines for ourselves.

Like we were saying before, I think it's particularly tricky in today's writing environment where a certain confessional impulse can actually be a big draw. It can help sell books.

My most recent novel came out in the fall, and it's a novel based on my grandmother's stories during World War Two. Everywhere that I went to talk about it, that was the first question people asked.

How much of this is real, and how much of this is based on her real story?

Which parts are real, and which ones did you make up?

It's like, well, it's a novel. You're not supposed to know necessarily which parts are real and not.

I went through a series of interviews, I was listening to other authors, I think maybe it was like interviews on NPR or something like that. I just was checking for a while to see how many times was the author's own personal life a part of the conversation surrounding the novel that they were publishing.

It was well over 50% of the time that was like one of the first questions being asked. How is this book authentic because it comes from your own experiences?

These are novels, so again, I feel like we should be able to appreciate the beauty of a piece of fiction without having to be reassured that it came from a true story first. Of course, that's exciting to know about, so people want to share it.

Joanna: I mean, I write horror and thriller and crime, and you get a lot fewer questions about, like, how much of this murderer is you? But then I do a lot of research.

So for example, my next thriller is called Death Valley, and it's set in Death Valley in California. There's all of the truth of the place, but then it's fictionalized.

I feel like with literary fiction, that is something that's an obsession with so many. Obviously, there's been some very high profile novels that have been ripped apart because they haven't been, so called, someone's own story. So I don't know, it's difficult.

Kristopher: Well, I think the trouble is when a novel is marketed on the basis of some sort of authenticity, suggesting that the writer's own experiences are informing it, and then it turns out not to be the case.

We've almost turned novels and fiction into nonfiction, and we have that same obligation that a memoirist does, to be fully honest about everything that goes into the book.

When James Frey had his big scandal around A Million Little Pieces, that book was originally written as a piece of fiction. It was supposed to be a novel, and nobody was interested in it. He then it changed it over and basically said, “Oh, what if I just pretend it was a memoir?” Then people loved it.

That's because you've given people this assurance that it's real. Going back to my earlier point, I think as fiction writers, we should try more often not to do that. So it's an easy way to get attention for the books that we're writing because, of course, people want to know that.

Even earlier books of mine, the very first question I would get asked at every event was, “How much of this is based on your real life?” I used to know a little better than I do today. I used to know to kind of demure a little bit at that question and say, “Oh, well, you know, that's personal. That's private.”

Joanna: That's great. Well, the book is super interesting. We're almost out of time, but—

Who is Revisionaries for? Who are the people who are going to get the most out of this book?

Kristopher: I really wrote it for writers in the earlier part of their lives. I really wished it was a book that I could have read when I was trying to write my first novel and feeling very frustrated.

I wrote three books before the first one that actually sold. Two of them had agents, and then couldn't find a publisher. All through that process I was feeling like, okay, maybe I'm just not good. Maybe I just don't have what it takes.

So this was the book that I wish that I had been able to read at that point in my life when I was worried that the fact that I was failing, or what felt like failure, was not some sign that I would never be as good as I wanted to be, or that I would never be as good as the other writers that I admired so much.

The only reason I hesitate to say that it's just for the writers trying to find a way to break out, is that when I was writing this book over the last five years, I was in the same position again.

I had published two novels. They both came out and did well, and then for whatever reason, I couldn't get the next one sold. Then I wrote another one, and that one didn't sell in the US. It only sold in French translation, which was a whole other story.

Joanna: Random.

Kristopher: Delightful. I hope the French enjoyed it.

Once again, all these years into my writing career, I hit a moment where I thought, okay, maybe that was it. Maybe I lost whatever I had, and now I can't do it again. Then writing this book was a nice way to remind myself that, actually, yes, this happens to lots of other writers.

Richard Wright had this huge hit and then his publisher rejected his next book. There are other stories like that in here about other writers like that. It's not a constant climb, higher and higher. It's an up and down experience.

Joanna: Yes, it's not a straight up-and-to-the-right graph.

Kristopher: Exactly, and there's nothing wrong with that being part of the way that it works.

Joanna: Indeed.

Where can people find you and your books online?

Kristopher: Well, KristopherJansma.com is my website. I'm on Instagram, and these days, Threads. Those are both great ways to find me.

I have a Substack called The Nature of the Fun where I post a short piece every month that's all dedicated to finding ways we discover the joy in our writing process and making it more fun again.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Kris. That was great.

Kristopher: Thanks so much, Jo.

The post How Ordinary Drafts Become Extraordinary Books. Revisionaries With Kristopher Jansma first appeared on The Creative Penn.