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. 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. 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. It's an endless, confusing, and often controversial conversation that, despite our bare-it-all culture, still remains taboo.

In this well-organized, fascinating anthology, a host of fiction and nonfiction authors share practical tips and emotional intelligence. You should never quit your day job, but your ultimate goal should be to quit your day job. The founder of the online journal Scratch, loaded with information about how authors labor to earn a livelihood, collects essays and interviews that appeared online and supplements those with original offerings. 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. But it occurred against a tragic backdrop of unrelated equine deaths at. '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. Fortes scratch brought the number of horses scratched from the 149th running of the race to a mind-boggling total of five.

Scratch by Manjula Martin