Conspicuous vs. Inconspicuous Writing

Trust the product, not the persona or the publicity

Dec 08, 2024

My Future Novels in a Future Bookstore Coming to a Future Near You

It feels like there are two modes when it comes to being an author:

Conspicuous Burning through the Battery (i.e., a publication year)
Inconspicuous Recharging of the Battery (work on new manuscript, revise it obsessively, think about new manuscript in the bathtub and on long walks and when meeting up with writing friends at cafés, then send new draft to editor, argent, or both)

Invariably when you’re in Inconspicuous Recharge Mode, some of your writing friends, mentors, literary idols, & frenemies will be racing through their own Conspicuous Burn Mode while you sit and watch and feel suddenly unproductive, which is ridiculous, of course, but related to the fact that when your (next) book becomes part of the literary production, tour, & publication cycle, you often feel the most like an author because authors gotta author. And this is for one very simple reason:

Our notion of who an author is and what an author does is falsely based on conspicuousness: authors must write things that other people can buy at bookstores (or online) and then take with them on the subway during their commute or at cafés or to their nightstand or on the beach during vacation or to their reading club or in the backseat during road trips. In our cultural imagination, to be an author is to create a kinetic object that is always going somewhere, always doing something, always in motion somehow even if it’s just inside our head. To be an author is to create material objects that people can touch, interact with, watch a movie adaptation of, see glowing in the bookstore window. To be an author (as seen from the world) is to create things that Skylight Books or Strand or the Tattered Cover can create stacks of that rise to the ceiling in the New Release section.

The irony here is that most of being an author is not that. It’s an inconspicuous art stage until the final stage unless your publicist is getting paid overtime to keep you in the spotlight. You will spend two, five, ten, twenty years working on the same manuscript obsessively. You will go through multiple drafts before your editor gets a sniff. If you’re like me, you will consider a million different endings and beginnings. You’ll toy with book titles and character names forever. You’ll wake up one morning convinced that the book you’d called Geography of Desire absolutely must now be changed to The Atlas of Tiny Desires before you change it back to Geography of Desire again, then Tiny Desires, then The World’s Smallest Human Geographies, & then, Fuck It: No One Buys Short Story Collections Anyway Unless That Author’s Debut Novel was a Hit so What the Hell Am I Even Doing?

But then one day, as you’re about to upload a revised draft with one of the above titles to the Yes Yes Books Competition, you suddenly see—clear as the LA sun in the winter California sky—that this isn’t a book of disparate characters traveling the world interconnected by philology, this is a book about a prodigy who is mixed-race and part Asian, just like you are. He is part Japanese and part Peruvian (just like your wife) and sometimes he’s the narrator and sometimes he’s just a minor character or a cameo in another character’s story and his name is Jessie Hayashi and that book’s title is actually The Miseducation of Jessie Hayashi & His Cosmic Dictionary of Loss. It’s a process.

But the only part of this whole artistic trajectory that readers will understand and that our popular culture imagines is the part it can see because that’s the only thing it can depict: conspicuous authorship. And that stage, while the sexiest and the easier to understand and the most romanticized in our culture, is just the final stage of the artistic production cycle. It’s the victory lap after the race is already done, after years of training and waking up at 5 AM and competing in local races and doing sprint work and HIIT sessions and competing in tournaments and invitationals.

Personally, I loved going on tour but that shit was exhausting. I loved seeing old friends and doing Q&As with writers I admire and traveling across the country but that shit was expensive. I loved promoting my work on social media but that shit was tedious. For many writers, going on tour is the ultimate dream. It’s the MFA daydream. But by the time I was done with the Love, Amnesia, & Dream Tour (2021-2023), I just wanted to sleep for a year and write things that gave me joy in my spare time. Things I loved. Things that reminded me of why I write.

I also learned something very early in my MFA career that I never forgot that intersects with this week’s newsletter: just as there are conspicuous and inconspicuous phases of a book’s trajectory, there are also conspicuous and inconspicuous writers. Some writers go back and forth between these typologies at will. Others are forced from one to another after losing their agent or getting blacklisted by the Big-5 or getting a hot shit agent after traveling the indie press circuit forever. But in my mind, the essential difference is this:

Conspicuous Writers are the ones who personify the idea of what writers are supposed to be and they have received public acknowledgement in more than one way. They perform the role of writer in every single thing they do from the books they read in public spaces to the memorized comebacks they use in literary discussions to the workshop critiques that flow out of their mouths as if written beforehand to the retro second-hand jeans they wear to the neighborhoods they live in: Brooklyn, Los Feliz, Wicker Park, Dupont Circle. Many conspicuous writers publish since almost all them have agents or did at one point or another. In the ‘90s and 2000s, they were almost entirely white straight men. Since the ‘10s, most of them are white or Asian women. They went to Columbia or Iowa or NYU or Michigan or Brooklyn College or Cornell for their MFAs (but Harvard or Princeton or Smith or Vassar or Wesleyan for undergraduate). Many of them were Stegner or Wisconsin fellows. They cut in line at MacDowell and Yaddo residencies without apology. In their defense, they don’t know how long the line actually is.

For all writers, the book is the prize artifact but for the conspicuous writer, the prestigious MFA program and the residency and the two-year fellowship and the writer-in-residency and the Genius Grant and the VAP appointment and the Radcliffe Grant are the jewelry they wear to every event, every reading, every contributors notes. With their collective gleam and their prize artifact in hand, the conspicuous writer gains admission ticket to literary festivals and panels and exclusive Electric Literature parties and Paris Review picnics. In interviews, they say everything except how lucky they are.

To be clear, some conspicuous writers are incredibly talented. But many are above average with excellent peers who pushed their technique to higher levels. Most are unbelievably unoriginal and offensively derivative. But you will always know about conspicuous writers because they’re the darlings of the industry and the industry always nominates their own (until they can’t afford to ignore you anymore like almost all West Coast writers).

Inconspicuous Writers are the ones who do all the hard and unglamorous work in the background away from the public eye without any fanfare or public acknowledgment. They didn’t go to NYU or Iowa or Columbia or Cornell or Johns Hopkins or Michigan or Wisconsin for their MFAs or if they did, they sat in the background and took copious notes but spent their weekends quietly working on their books while their cohort went out drinking and argued about books and fought to be the cleverest writer in the Gastropub. Inconspicuous writers rarely went to an Ivy as undergrads because they’re more sensible and they can’t afford to waste money and if they went to a private university for their MFA or PhD it was only because they got a full ride. They suffer from imposter syndrome. Sometimes, even after they publish books to critical acclaim, they have a hard time identifying as authors. They still feel stupid telling strangers that they’re writers. “Doesn’t every college grad at some point put ‘writer’ in their social media bio, even though they’ve never published a thing?” they wonder to themselves. Inconspicuous writers don’t know anyone else in their family or group of friends (at least until their MFAs) who has gone on to become published writer because that idea seems foreign and slightly absurd and let’s be honest, very white upper-class and very East Coast.

In the back of their minds, the idea of being a writer stills seems like a self-indulgent fantasy. A way of avoiding reality. A way to live in a permanent daydream that started when they became readers.

Inconspicuous writers are used to being ignored by literary prizes and festivals because just as many of them have agents as don’t. The ones that don’t often publish with small presses (and not even the most famous ones). And some inconspicuous writers with the most talent and the best work ethic do not publish at all because they don’t have the time to dedicate their whole life to authorship. They didn’t marry rich. They’re not rich. Their parents aren’t rich. There is no trust fund. There is no will. They have no cultural capital to spend. They weren’t given an internship at The New Yorker just because they’re MFA students in NYC. So, they have to work for money and write in their spare time, just like they did in college and grad school and adulthood. Sometimes academia makes sense but it has a lot of limitations that many inconspicuous writers would rather avoid like department politics, salary compression, corporatization of academia, Karens in the classroom, the problematics of teaching of craft, meddlesome deans, the transactional ethos of the American university, the impossibility of teaching talent, etc., etc. Often, there’s a class difference between a conspicuous and an inconspicuous writer but not always since writers can travel back and forth between categories. Often there’s a generic difference too: many inconspicuous writers write in various sub-genres of fiction whereas most conspicuous writers outside of the national bestsellers write only in literary fiction because that is the genre of greatness after all. Haven’t you heard?

And while I’ll admit that I definitely envy the way some authors have had to work so little to become famous while the rest of us continue slogging through our own manuscripts that are objectively more original and more polished than most conspicuous manuscripts and that, not surprisingly, agents won’t touch unless the words Iowa or Columbia or NYU pop up in our cover letters in 18-point font or we have 2 million followers on TikTok, the truth is that I’m not judging conspicuous writers for their conspicuousness. I harbor no real hatred for conspicuous artists and I never have. I just don’t trust them artistically. They’re almost never the most talented artists this country has to offer. They’re almost never the most important artists this country has to offer. And quite honestly, many of them treat books like just another achievement to win in a lifetime of trophy collecting. For some conspicuous writers, the acclaim becomes the point, not the writing. The lifestyle becomes the point. The outdated glam becomes the point. After they’ve published a book or two, their ambition dwindles because they lack a burning desire to create art for the rest of their lives. They lack a singular vision for their body of work. They feel heard in a sense. They are artists that have been blessed with an extraordinary amount of attention in the literary media. And that’s a very different thing than what most of us were given, which was nothing at all, even when we deserved it.

In time, most writers are rendered inconspicuous by virtue of being ignored by the New York literary media and almost all writers spend time in the inconspicuous period working on their manuscripts for years and even decades, but conspicuous writers, unlike the rest of us, get attention even before their books are out and even more once they’re available because because because. And while I’ll never burn out like many of the conspicuous writers I follow who seem to write less and less over time as the industry moves on to the next big thing, I admit, I’d love some of their spotlight when my next book is out there in the world for the simple reason that I always want more readers. I spend between three and fifteen years on each book I write and I want all my books to give readers something they can immerse themselves in and return to again and again and find joy and consolation and beauty and inspiration in. I want my books to have community as much as I want to celebrate the books in my community with all of my writing friends whose talent is the slow burn the industry ignores until it can’t anymore. And that’s really my advice if you’re an inconspicuous writer and you’ve made it this far into this newsletter: keep writing until the industry has no choice but to see your art and help propagate it in the world for its own selfish reasons.

Mixtape by Jackson Bliss | ジャクソンのミクステープ

Discussion about this post