Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living edited by Manjula Martin

Reviewed By

The title appears in gold on a giant fountain pen: Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Fine art of Making a Living. Floating around the pen on the pale green cover are a swath of handwritten names—Cheryl Strayed, Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Weiner, Susan Orlean, Alexander Chee, Roxane Gay, Yiyun Li, Austin Kleon, Leslie Jamison. I get excited. I love a good anthology of writers on writing—the insights, the examples, the advice, the sheer generosity of writers. Some writings on writing—Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, for case—even ascent to the level of the art they describe.

As it happened, I was waiting to hear back from my agent about my novel manuscript—which is akin to small-scale-calibration torture—when Scratch arrived in the mail. Right abroad I realized I had made a fault. This was non a book about writing. This was a book near writing… and money.

For whatever reason, "writing and money" feels like a taboo topic. I belong to a network of women writers in the greater Bay Area who have traditionally published at to the lowest degree one book. The grouping started a decade back, and over time we formed a single rule about our meetings: no talking about publishing or marketing. Business could non be our topic. We discuss it plenty in our grouping email conversations, but when we get together in person, nothing sinks an afternoon similar the angst, jealousy, despair and sheer impenetrability of the publishing world. Instead, we focus on craft and creativity, on our own writing.

Is information technology writing or coin that lies at the heart of what we do? That is one of the question that Scratch asks.

The first essay is by Julia Fierro, who somehow is a Facebook friend of mine, though I don't know her at all. She tells a good story about a creepy house with a haunted history and a basement full of shelves of books. Her childhood was saved past books, and books carry her through graduate school at Iowa, all the mode to New York, where the promise of signing with a literary agent and a shopping a manuscript wilts. The volume fails to sell, adjunct education is a grind, and Fierro needs to sell those beloved savior books to pay the hire. She ends up education writing privately—equally I practise—and building the Sackett Street Writers' Workshop, "today home to over three thousand writers." My own Book Writing Earth is today home to about twoscore-five writers, dedicated souls who fill all my classes, but…iii yard? Flipping to her bio, I am reminded that her start novel was published in 2014 and she has another forthcoming this twelvemonth. I'one thousand comparison my life with hers. I'm no longer young enough for these stories to represent possible futures for me; they are, instead, alternating versions of my life, alternate versions of my own successes and failures, pressing on that item American nerve, "making it"—and that doesn't refer to art!

Nina MacLaughlin'south next, with a piece about desperately needing coin when her seasonal carpentry piece of work failed to resurface subsequently a winter intermission. During this period, she wrote a book review for free. She grapples with the emotions, the politics, and the practise of writing for costless, for exposure. The Rumpus has but started offering a nominal bounty to its reviewers, merely I was in essence reading this book in gild to write a free review. "Did I experience aroused about it?" Nina MacLaughlin writes. "I did not. I justified it easily: it was purpose, focus, work… Writing for free looked like work. It felt like work. But it was the illusion of work, a funhouse mirror reflection. I crucial aspect was missing." But! Miraculously, this review inspires an editor to contact her, to encourage her to write a volume. Their lunch meeting leads to connections with agents and somewhen the auction of her book on proposal.

And so there is the shimmery recommendation, within my rightful reach: Put yourself out there! Write widely! Write as much equally yous can for places you admire! Who cares if yous don't get paid!…With luck and endeavour who knows what will happen!

Wouldn't nosotros all beloved that uncomplicated summing up?

But of form she rejects that story, fifty-fifty though she'southward lived it. "Sometimes it works out that way. Mostly it doesn't. And of course information technology matters to be paid. It matters a great deal." She refuses the idea that opportunity and audition are forms of currency. Her own "rush and hustle" keep, post-obit the publication of her volume. "Sometimes I write for complimentary; mostly I endeavor not to."

That nervus is throbbing now. I put the book downwards and read others and come dorsum to it. The third piece is an interview with Cheryl Strayed. She talks numbers. Information technology's a little dirty and thrilling, reminds me of the time ane of my teenaged friend asked another'due south parents how much their fancy hotel room price, as nosotros stood admiring the view; a small uproar and dismissal ensued. Strayed'south is a pleasurable success story. She worked hard, she gave back earlier she had been given, she had her kids about the aforementioned historic period I had mine, and her husband, similar my partner, makes films. I'm happy for her. I always appreciate her take-no-prisoners wisdom.

Then Manjula Martin, editor of the collection and interviewer of some of the better-known authors who announced on the cover but did non contribute essays, asks Strayed about "the press and stories about your life and career [that] seemed to imply y'all're a tardily bloomer." Strayed thinks that's "hilarious." She defends her "very shine trajectory" from early desire to write, through majoring in English, through writing, graduate school, revision, and selling two books (the novel Torch and the delinquent best-seller Wild). My own trajectory does not feel polish and is missing the grand finale of hers.

Panic kicks in as I motion on to Rachel Maddux rejecting the idea of "staying hungry":

For the first time, I began to ask myself what I was writing toward. Information technology'due south a question I'm still trying to answer.

This get-go section of the volume is called "Early Days." Kiese Laymon's piece is written with a short story's catamenia and interpersonal conflict (between a author and an editor). I'm excited to read Alexander Chee'due south description of his writing career because I admire the style he'south created a platform via his non-fiction. Only in each piece, there seems to be fiddling generalizable advice. You say yes to some things and no to others, and if one of the yesses catches someone's eye, another opportunity may ascend. It's pinball—with lights and bells, with an accent on timing over skill, on having admission to the next ball when the one you're playing disappears.

I do glean some ideas. Cari Luna talks virtually her showtime amanuensis breaking up with her, and finding an agent who was a partner, a "practiced fit." She shifts the terms of what 1 should consider paramount in such a relationship.

Caille Millner's conversation with Richard Rodriguez offers the kinds of nuggets that continue a writer going: "The globe opens itself up to those who are willing to be lone… Neglect gave me the sense that the world was mine, because no one knew who I was or what I was doing. I felt the freedom to accept risks." And advice: "Here are a few other things younger writers don't hear about this career: If you're going to become a writer, you have to kickoff introducing yourself to people. You have to know how to talk. People need to like you lot in this business, to remember you well." Rodriguez as well makes the stunning comment, "I believe that race is an erotic category; it's the record of our parents' lovemaking."

Yiyun Li inspires because she'due south hardworking and shuns social media. Talking to a young writer who tells her, "I just actually want to get published," she asks, "Why? Writing is non a race. What's the hurry? And he said, You lot don't understand. Young people have appetite. And I thought, That's the incorrect appetite. If y'all get there get-go, information technology doesn't mean yous're the best." As for her own goals, she brings up Chekhov, Graham Greene. "[M]y ambition is to always measure myself confronting these expressionless people. And that solves all my problems about money and fame, because they're all expressionless!"

This section ends with J. Robert Lennon's grappling with the role of commerce in art. He quotes Nabokov—"I write for pleasance, merely I publish for money"—so takes autonomously this philosophy, the suggestion that, "[T]hither is writing, and in that location is commerce, and betwixt them stands an impenetrable wall of inestimably thick bulletproof glass."

Past now I have gotten my manuscript back from my agent with "notes." She loves the writing but the plot needs piece of work, and the publishing globe is such that everyone is looking for the big book, not nurturing talent. I long for that inestimably thick glass, merely information technology feels fragile or non-real. So it is a relief when Lennon admits he'due south "wary of discouraging students, or whatsoever author, really, from developing a relationship with the thought of commerce," and goes on to argue that "[o]ur commerce with the earth is not corollary to our art. It is, rather, a vital component of our art, perhaps our art's reason for being."

Lennon allows that thinking about publishing is a part of the writing procedure itself. "A literary work unconcerned with the desires of its audience is like a thoughtless gift…. Yous aren't going to change the world without loving it first." There is much to grapple with, but it's hard going, forcing me to swing between noble ambitions and base of operations desires. Which is best, which is right, which is possible?

The second department of Scratch, The Daily Grind, begins with Manjula Martin's essay, "The Best Piece of work in Literature." She tells her own story of working to write while questioning the worth of such work, concluding, "The just clear truth each of my jobs has taught me is that the working life—real life—is just equally important as the writing life. Hither's why: they're the aforementioned affair."

Our not-writing work matters as much as, and is a part of, the writing itself. Family, jobs, all our other duties force us to collaborate with our great subject: the world. At this point in my reading, I was on a beach in United mexican states, watching, at a altitude, while my partner played with my children. I have long requested this precise vacation—both the presence and the altitude of my children, the book from which my gaze now and then lifts to take in the view, of which my family is a office. Normally they are and then shut up.

And hither, with Leslie Jamison'south article, I hit the inspiration I'd been seeking. Similar Lennon and Martin, Jamison challenges that glass wall, albeit with a dissimilar metaphor: "What if we stopped thinking of money as the muddied hugger-mugger of creative pursuit and instead recognized money as one of its constituent threads?" She invokes Raymond Carver: "Fuck the cannon, he says. I was influenced by having to pay the bills, for myself and for my family."

In that location is a lot of honesty in this middle section, a lot of details we don't request in polite company. "For the novel, I got a $12,500 accelerate. And for Bad Feminist, I got $xv,000," Roxane Gay announces forthrightly. When asked what she aspires to adjacent in her career, Gay answers, "I would similar to win a Pulitzer. Only more importantly, I would like to write something worthy of a Pulitzer." Bald ambition is rarely owned. People who have won the Pulitzer and similarly 1000, prestigious prizes frequently claim that such recognition was a dream they'd never dared dream. It's enough to make you suspect that it's all-time to remain ignorant of your own ambitions. Gay's direct ambition is refreshing.

The daily grind narrows both the breadth and the terror of those early, anything-is-possible days. Harmony Holiday frames Amiri Baraka'south commerce and poetry in the context of his granddad'south lynching, talking taxes and reparations. Emily Gould presses on a sore bespeak, especially for women in publishing: likeability. Sari Botton gives us the accident-by-blow of ghostwriting other people'due south stories. Choire Sicha takes us through the vocabulary of advertisement writing, disarming u.s.a. that it'south a mundane, boring world. Nell Boeschenstein becomes willing to accept a education task when she swore she'd never hole herself upward within academia, and Sarah Smarsh quits her tenured professorship without a internet. Money—survival, success, making a living—is the external plot to the deep interiority of a writing life.

The last section is called "Anytime." This department is a bit of an amalgamation, every bit if the anthology did non quite know what "someday" might await like, at present that nosotros've best-selling that commerce is function of art. YA author Malinda Lo admits: "Plenty of authors who appear to be successful in public are, in private, struggling to get past on dwindling royalty payments, or working an unglamorous day job, or are married to someone with a much more reliable income. That last i is me." This section includes interviews with Austin Kleon (whose books Steal Similar an Artist and Prove Your Piece of work are wonderful contributions to the larger conversation of surviving as an creative person), Nick Hornby, and Jonathan Franzen, equally well as an essay past Jennifer Weiner about the downside of her success—not beingness taken seriously by critics—and, oddly, an FAQ on how to buy a home.

For some of these successful writers, the possibility, withal slim, of writing for a living became a specific goal before they reached information technology. As Nick Hornby puts it: "Lots of artistic work is very highly valued in the market place, and I could see that many artists I admired seemed to be making a living, and I wanted to make my living that way too. And I have done, and I know lots of other people that have washed besides." As well, Jennifer Weiner notes, "You don't go a writer to become rich. Still, people got rich doing it…. I knew it was possible to practise the thing I loved and get paid, a lot, if yous were good at information technology, if you wrote something wonderful, something that people wanted to read."

It may exist that we live in a different time, or information technology may be—like The Secret claims—that I simply don't believe in this abundance plenty. Franzen admits to a like appetite but acknowledges that "life has gotten harder for the so-called midlist writer, because people reach for star writers when their reading time is limited, and when conventional media coverage of novels is shrinking."

The volume ends, unexpectedly, with an essay by Laura Goode about producing an indie motion-picture show "in 9 Like shooting fish in a barrel Steps." Crowdfunding, direct distribution… Information technology made me realize that at that place'd been not one mention of cocky-publishing in the whole collection. Indie film seems a scrappier, more artistic undertaking than self-publishing. Perhaps because information technology requires collective buy-in, the curation of other people's efforts makes super-indie picture show more like small press publishing than like self-publishing.

But why is this the final essay in the book? Does it mean to suggest that for all our struggles and ambition, another medium will win out? Or that writing and getting our voices out into the earth tin take many forms? Perhaps information technology'due south simply Goode'south high-energy optimism that sounded the note Martin wanted to resonate with usa subsequently nosotros turned the last folio:

If I choke a little reading these lines [of Kipling's poem "If—"]…, it'southward non considering they make me bitter, or distressing, or regretful. Information technology's considering they fill up me with such joy and gratitude that Meera and I dug upwardly the grit to alive them; it's because nosotros'll never have to wonder what might take happened if we had risked everything to tell the story we most needed to tell.

Elizabeth Stark is the author of a novel, Shy Girl (FSG/ Seal Press), author/ director of two curt films distributed by Frameline, and cohost of a podcast, StoryMakersShow.com. More from this author →