Writing for Love And/Or Money: Outtakes from a Life Spec, the Early Years

From the Introduction: As the man introducing me at the Community College goes on about my loftier achievements and awards, the audience (kids from families straining so they can get a higher education) openly yawns. Scrapping my prepared remarks, I tell them 90 percent of my career has been failure. I've been dead broke six times and if I don't sell something soon it'll be seven. I have their attention. In short, I'm a working writer with a family to support who, to make a buck, has written for such TV series as The Rifleman, Have Gun will Travel, Wanted Dead or Alive.Having seen these shows via reruns, they react.Tearing up my speech to applause, I invite questions about any aspect of my life that interests them.Silence.Then a tentative hand: What would you have become if you weren't a writer? A professional gambler. That opens the floodgates.These kids aren't interested in what my life is like since I attained a measure of success. What they want to know is how I got there, which might shed light on what they'll have to go through in whatever field they choose.Writing for Love and/or Money recounts some of the things I shared with them and many more, which there wasn't time for.At fourteen, a boy in the Bronx, addicted to gambling (craps, horses, ball games, cards), moved by forces unknown to him, writes a one-page story that his aunt, who works on The World Telegram, asks a reporter to assess. The reporter sends it back with the notation: "The boy has narrative ability. Tell him to stay away from journalism."Twenty-six years later the reporter (Ed Wallace) interviews the "boy" when he wins a Pulitzer prize for playwriting.What happened to the "boy" in those intervening years (including World War II, Dartmouth College, Mexico, and Hollywood) is the stuff dreams, and occasional nightmares, are made of.