Scratch

Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living

Manjula Martin

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501134593
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

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.

EARLY DAYS

OWNING THIS

Julia Fierro

My family moved when I was in fourth grade, into a ramshackle home on a desirable woodsy island off Long Island Sound. The location and school district seemed a steal despite the house’s decrepitude—moldy ceilings, termite-infested walls, and a well that pumped metallic-tasting water—and my father, a Southern Italian immigrant born into poverty and pestilence, also a survivor of WWII, performed miracles with jars of spackle and the discontinued paint he’d bought half off at some faraway hardware store he frequented for its sales. We loved our new home, and delighted in calling it “our mansion,” despite the way it seemed to sag under its sad history. Abandoned by the previous owners, the pert Realtor explained, a family with three sons. She had sped through the summary—teenage boys turned delinquent, drugs and alcohol, a messy divorce, etc., etc. Years later, we’d hear the full story. The mother of the wild boys had tried to kill herself, twice. First, by stabbing herself in the kitchen where we’d sing “Happy Birthday” and hold Christmas family dinners. Second, and this time successfully, by jumping out the window in the room that would become my bedroom.

What mattered most to me as a child growing up in that house wasn’t the story of that lost family but what they left behind. Books. Shelves upon shelves of books that covered two walls in the musty, cavernous basement. Some hardcovers, but mostly dog-eared paper­backs and pocket-sized mass-market editions, almost all novels. From Madame Bovary to The Clan of the Cave Bear to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. My parents did not care about the books (or, I suspect, consider their genre, their quality, or their suitability for a young reader like myself). Through their immigrant and working class–bred eyes, books were books—to be admired, collected, and displayed in the hope that their sophisticated light would reflect back on you. I imagine this practice of imbuing objects with transformative power is common in people with immigrant and blue-collar roots. Isn’t it a pillar of the American Dream? Money, spent in the right way, can allow you to reinvent your identity. Rewrite your story—past, present, and future drafts.

It wasn’t as if I’d never had books. My father, for whom reading in English is still a challenge but whose yearning to learn never stopped him from trying, drove me to the public library every Saturday morning. But the books in the basement were my own—I could read them while eating, take them on hikes in the woods, even flip through their pages while soaking in the bathtub. I could do with them as I pleased. They made me giddy with power.

Today, I own approximately three thousand books. I have gone into debt buying books and made poor financial choices, again and again, for the love of books—buying a stack of glossy-covered novels instead of paying off bills, binge-ordering a dozen buzzed-about novels online instead of putting money aside for my children’s college fund. When my annual credit card report arrives each year, and when I prepare my annual taxes, I wince at the hefty number under BOOKS, and wonder, naively, if there was a computing mistake. Why can’t I borrow those books from the library? Why must I own them?

I arrived at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop a few weeks before my twenty-third birthday, my car towing a U-Haul filled mostly with books that my then boyfriend, whom I would marry shortly after graduation, had helped me pack and carry. I had focused on Early American and Russian literature as an undergraduate, and I thought of those books’ authors as my family, a mostly white, dead, and bearded male family (except for matriarch Edith Wharton). Like most families, it wasn’t one I’d chosen myself. These were the books I’d been assigned in high school and college, almost all part of the established literary canon.

I knew little about contemporary authors; the few collections of short stories I’d read left me feeling hollow and longing for the grand ideas and hyperbolic emotions of Dostoyevsky and Hawthorne. It wasn’t until my first graduate program party in Iowa City, where I spent the night talking to a group of poets (i.e., the most well-read people on the planet) that I realized I was in over my head. They chattered endlessly about authors I’d never heard of—David Foster Wallace, Tobias Wolff, Lorrie Moore, and countless other living writers. If the poets had read these fiction writers, then, surely, I should have.

The next morning, I cashed my loan check and rushed to the famous Iowa City bookstore, Prairie Lights. I hurried back home, as fast as I could, carrying heavy bags full of contemporary short story collections. What if another student in the writing program saw me? They’d know I was a fraud. I returned to that bookstore, and every other bookstore in town. Soon my apartment’s bookshelves overflowed with new and used books. I hoped they would help make me look, and sound, like a legitimate writer.

I made friends with another MFA student who, like me, had grown up in a working-class family composed of nonreaders. Compared to the rest of the students in our program, it seemed as if my friend and I had, at birth, by some miracle of chance, been tapped on the head by a magical book fairy—a blessing and a curse, for it made us so unlike those we grew up among. In my friend’s apartment, autographed first edition hardcovers sat gleaming in plastic wrap behind glass-enclosed bookshelves. We sat on his threadbare sofa and he showed me his books. I held them as delicately as if they were newborns.

I, too, began to collect first edition hardcovers with the hope that one of those revered contemporary authors would visit our program, which they often did, and I could have them sign the spotless title page, wrap the book in plastic, and place it on the highest bookshelf for safekeeping. First edition hardcovers are hard to come by, and I began searching for and buying books online through collectors. My loan money moved from my bank account to my bookshelf, and not once did I stop myself, look around my apartment at the stacks of unread books—several lifetimes’ worth—and think of Jay Gatsby and his library of pristine uncut books. My fear was too loud. Fear that I was inauthentic, undeserving of a place among my mostly Ivy League–educated classmates who, it seemed, were more well-read than even the gray-haired authors who were our professors. My books were a barricade I built between that fear and myself.

After I graduated, my soon-to-be-husband once again packed and carried boxes of my books—ten times what we’d arrived with only two years earlier—and we drove a U-Haul from Iowa City to New York City. We performed what had by then become our ritual—carrying my thousands of books up five flights of stairs, followed by my obsessive organizing of the bookshelves according to genre. It was the fall of 2002 and our future felt invincibly bright—I had signed with a literary agent at a big agency, who was certain my first novel would be a hit, and photocopies of said novel were landing on the desks of editors throughout the city. I was interviewing for teaching positions at universities, and my husband had a lead on several jobs. The dreamy writer’s life I had envisioned in graduate school, crafted by borrowing my more experienced classmates’ lofty expectations as well as my tuition funds, seemed inevitable.

Six months later, my novel had been rejected by what seemed like every editor in New York City, I was being paid less than ten thousand dollars a year as an adjunct professor, and my husband had secured, and lost, several jobs. We stopped paying our bills so we could scrape rent together each month. I rarely left the apartment except to teach, avoided literary events, and, for the first time, stopped visiting bookstores. I wasn’t writing. The slow and continuous rejection of my novel had destroyed the borrowed confidence I’d had at Iowa. What shocked me most was that I couldn’t read. My treasured books were now a reminder that I had failed. They sat undisturbed on my shelves, dusty reminders that, perhaps, after all, I shouldn’t have tried to rise above my station.

I am still amazed that I found the confidence to post an ad on Craigslist—“Iowa grad teaching fiction workshop in Brooklyn”—and I know that it was the need to talk about books, about how they thrill and comfort and save us, that lifted me from my pathetic self-pity and allowed me to hold the very first writing class, in my dimly lit Brooklyn kitchen, that would grow into the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, today home to over three thousand writers. With each class of motivated and enthusiastic students, many so talented and hardworking I considered them my peers, my faith in myself, and others, regrew—this time as sturdy and deep as the roots of a tree.

I began to sell my collection of books, one at a time, and I started with those I treasured most—the first editions signed by my favorite novelists. I sold them online and made back only a quarter of what I’d spent buying them but, slowly, we paid off our debts. As the shelves grew bare, my kitchen filled night after night with living, breathing writers, and it was through these writers—mostly unpublished and unpolished, but all mad for books—that I found the courage to return to writing.

I continue to buy books and I’ve replaced some of those favorites I sold years ago. I continue to feel little guilt for the thousands of dollars I spend on books each year. I have my excuses—I’m supporting writers, many friends and colleagues. I’m supporting publishing, independent bookstores, literature with a capital L. But really I buy too many books because books were, and always will be, my redemption.

WITH COMPLIMENTS

Nina MacLaughlin

The mornings, at first, were long and leisurely. Soft boiled eggs on buttered toast, coffee, unrushed, relaxed chatter; the small orange kitchen felt especially warm as winter wrapped itself around Cambridge. It was the start of a welcome annual shift. As the year moved into winter, the carpentry work I do, and had been doing for three years at that point, slowed, as it always did in the lead-up to Thanksgiving, and I shifted into writing mode. Instead of waking up and racing off to build bookshelves or slam hickory floorboards with a mallet or hang cabinets or frame a deck or swear over installing crown molding...