God & Man

56 Notes From Writers On The Morbid Reality Of 'Making A Living' As A Writer

"Plenty of authors who appear to be successful in public are, in private, struggling to get by." This is the overwhelming theme of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Scratch-Writers-Money-Making-Living-ebook/dp/B01CO347DG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&;qid=1486065112&;sr=8-1&;keywords=scratch">Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living</a>, a collection of essays by writer's talking about about their work (and then what actually pays the bills). I've quoted some of the notable parts here, but the whole book is worth a read for anyone who wants to write professionally.
Chrissy Stockton
February 2, 2017
“I will not try to convince you to love me, to respect me, to commit to me. I deserve better than that; I AM BETTER THAN THAT...Goodbye.”
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Tagged: Love, Breakups, Heartbreak, strength, Relationships
“I’ve had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. A heart is to be spent.”
— Stephen Dunn, Sixty
Tagged: Love, Breakups, Heartbreak, strength, Relationships
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
— Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Address, 2005
Tagged: Love, Breakups, Heartbreak, strength, Relationships
“I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
“Sometimes it takes a heartbreak to shake us awake & help us see we are worth so much more than we're settling for.”
— Mandy Hale, The Single Woman
Tagged: Heartbreak, Pain, Settling
“He loved me. He loved me, but he doesn't love me anymore, and it's not the end of the world.”
— Jennifer Weiner, Good in Bed
Tagged: Love, Heartbreak, Breakups
“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.”
— Julia Fierro, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“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.”
— Julia Fierro, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money, Quote of the Moment
“Writing for free looked like work. It felt like work. But it was the illusion of work, a fun house mirror reflection.”
— Nina Maclaughlin, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money, Quote of the Moment
“I feel strongly that we're only hurting ourselves as writers by being so secretive about money. There's no other job in the world where you get your master's degree in that field and you're like, 'Well, I might make zero or I might make $5 million!'”
— Cheryl Strayed, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“I had accrued $50,000 in credit card debt to write that book. The same thing happened later with 'Wild', only I was in deeper debt. So I got that check for 'Torch', and it was gone the next day. I actually paid my credit card bill. Poof!”
— Cheryl Strayed, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money, Quote of the Moment
“So I sold my book for $100,000, and what I received was a check for about $21,000 a year over the course of four years, and I paid a third of that to the IRS. Don't get me wrong, the book deal helped a lot -- it was like getting a grant every year for four years. But it wasn't enough to live off.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“It was like, my book is on the New York Times bestseller list right now and we do not have any money in our checking account.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“I turn the novel in. I go out to a celebration dinner with a very normal guy I have somehow fallen into dating. I pick at a whole fish and order dessert. I make bathroom visits devoted solely to dropping benzodiazepine crumbs under my tongue, licking any residue off my finger. 

The novel made it, but I didn't.”
— Porochista Khakpour, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money, Before and after
“I have gone to post-book deal hell and all I got was this serious debt. But it's an okay place to be, there are no surprises in debt.”
— Porochista Khakpour, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“Money taints everything, why not writing too?”
— Colin Dickey, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“The reality is, more and more and more, being a writer is running your own business. While I've had salaries, and I've been an employee, overall and ultimately and certainly increasingly so, being a writer is running a small business.”
— Susan Orlean, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“For each person it can be a different financial arrangement. For a long time [at the New Yorker] I did what many writers do, which is agree in the beginning of the year to do a certain number of pieces, and then that amount was paid out to me over the year -- the aggregate of all of that. So I would say, okay, I'm going to do five five-thousand-word pieces, and we'd agree to this chunk of money, and then it would be paid in twelve monthly installments over a year.”
— Susan Orlean, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“In almost every other profession, people have a pretty good idea of what others are making, and I think, in writing, among the people I know, people have no idea. And the difference between people who do very well and people who are just getting by is a big range.”
— Susan Orlean, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“For those who are not writers (and many of those who are), there is an illusory "made it" point, the point at which the writer no longer has to worry about money. It doesn't exist unless you were born someone who didn't ever have to worry about it.”
— Alexander Chee, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“I wanted to be around people who wrote no matter what they were paid and yet I also wanted to make a living at writing. I was young enough to think this was a serious approach.”
— Alexander Chee, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“Selling fiction feels like I've cast a spell on the world and made it give me something that didn't exist before. It's the closest thing to actual magic I can think of.”
— Alexander Chee, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“I was supported by various people early in my writing life. I spent a lot of time lying by swimming pools at other people's houses, housesitting, looking at Italian fashion magazines.”
— Richard Rodriguez, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“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 start introducing yourself to people. You have to know how to talk. People need to like you in this business, to remember you well.”
— Richard Rodriguez, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“I think any kind of experience is good for a writer, except sitting at home all the time. If my students have a character who does nothing, I always ask them, 'Well, where does the money come from? How does he live?' And they cannot answer.”
— Yiyun Li, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“Writing doesn't feed anybody.”
— Yiyun Li, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“For most of us, writing is not particularly pleasurable, and publishing does not make us much money.”
— J. Robert Lennon, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“The separation of art and commerce, while a noble aim, is in reality to an endeavor akin, in the rarefied and impoverished professional universe where writers actually reside, to the separation of smoking and drinking. A nice thought, but yeah, good luck with that.”
— J. Robert Lennon, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money, Quote of the Moment
“I started to realize work wasn't what was holding me back; the ideal of The Writer's Life was. Once I let myself understand that statistically I would probably never -- yes, never -- be able to quit working, the hours I spent agonizing over having a day job became hours in which I could write.”
— Manjula Martin, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money