I gave my publishing imprint a name in French: Bohème Éclat.
The words mean what they sound like they mean. Bohème, the old word for a life lived on its own terms, outside a conventional groove. Éclat is brilliance, distinction, a flash of style. They look like opposites: the garret and the salon, the artist and the aesthete. Freedom at the cost of polish, polish in lieu of freedom. One is supposed to choose.
The phrase, once it had introduced itself, kept following me around and tapping me on the shoulder. It became the name of the imprint because the books needed to live somewhere. It also reminds me of the difference between being a writer and having a writing career.
A career is a public artifact: launches, rankings, posts about launches and rankings, and a platform demanding as much maintenance as my hair color. You become a writer to write, because you have things you must say, and when you say them out loud to other humans you sound crazy, which you may very well be. Nevertheless, there it is. Simple.
The two are not enemies, but they are often put to work against each other. The career can fail while a life flourishes. The career can succeed while a life hollows out. Most of the nonsense passed off as advice about writing is about business, because that is the part someone else can monetize. Without sales, no one except the writer (and those in love with the writer) cares about a writer.
You write to live a writer’s life. The romance of it is not a marketing ploy invented to lure unsuspecting English majors into the grinding profession of exposing one’s innards to the public. The romance is the spirit of the life when the work is done for its own sake. Solitary hours, the desk, the coffee going cold because there is this one sentence arriving sideways that you have to nail before you take a sip.
Then one day you open the laptop and the voice begins.
Metrics. Feeds. An ambient sense that other writers are optimizing their careers in a way you are not. The noise is not out there. Feeds can be closed. Phones can be put in another room. The internal voice has absorbed the logic of the platforms and now repeats it back to you sounding like your own thinking. You should be posting more. Your funnel should be better. The book will do better when you do the thing you do not want to do. You are the problem holding back the work.
You cannot argue with this voice on its own terms, because its terms are reasonable. It is, in a sense, correct. The book would do better. The platform would grow. The career would benefit from more of what you decline.
Bohème Éclat, I say, more often than I would have predicted when I chose the pestering name. Not that. This. Brilliant freedom is the life we came for: the morning, the desk, the page.