Scratch
Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
A collection of essays from today’s most acclaimed authors—from Cheryl Strayed to Roxane Gay to Jennifer Weiner, Alexander Chee, Nick Hornby, and Jonathan Franzen—on the realities of making a living in the writing world.
In the literary world, the debate around writing and commerce often begs us to take sides: either writers should be paid for everything they do or writers should just pay their dues and count themselves lucky to be published. You should never quit your day job, but your ultimate goal should be to quit your day job. It’s an endless, confusing, and often controversial conversation that, despite our bare-it-all culture, still remains taboo. In Scratch, Manjula Martin has gathered interviews and essays from established and rising authors to confront the age-old question: how do creative people make money?
As contributors including Jonathan Franzen, Cheryl Strayed, Roxane Gay, Nick Hornby, Susan Orlean, Alexander Chee, Daniel Jose Older, Jennifer Weiner, and Yiyun Li candidly and emotionally discuss money, MFA programs, teaching fellowships, finally getting published, and what success really means to them, Scratch honestly addresses the tensions between writing and money, work and life, literature and commerce. The result is an entertaining and inspiring book that helps readers and writers understand what it’s really like to make art in a world that runs on money—and why it matters. Essential reading for aspiring and experienced writers, and for anyone interested in the future of literature, Scratch is the perfect bookshelf companion to On Writing, Never Can Say Goodbye, and MFA vs. NYC.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Martin collects interviews from her online magazine, Scratch, and pairs them with new and reprinted essays to demonstrate that the mysterious economics of literature create wildly different versions of writerly success. The writers, including Alexander Chee, Jonathan Franzen, Roxane Gay, and Jennifer Weiner, recount an assortment of amusing anecdotes, hard-headed pragmatism (Nick Hornby: "I do understand I'm working in a marketplace"), some tongue-in-cheek ribbing (J. Robert Lennon: "Art and commerce are not separate. They are not even different"), and a few harrowing tales of poverty, discrimination, and despair. The collection pokes holes in cherished cultural myths about the writing life and examines, from various angles, the transformation when writing goes from being a dream to a job. The shared conclusion among the diverse, entertaining, often humorous, sometimes plaintive voices is that writing should be as remunerative as any other useful skill, but the work must be its own reward. Martin's collection removes the romantic veil surrounding the production of the written word and provides some solid counseling for aspirants on what it means to offer the labors of their heart for sale in the marketplace.
