Conspicuous vs. Inconspicuous Writing
Trust the product, not the persona or the publicity
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:
