From the introduction to Robert Daley's memoir Writing On The Edge - The Ups and Downs of a Freelance Career
"I was a freelance writer. So were Hemingway, Shakespeare and many others. I lived wholly from my writing. I wrote magazine articles and stories. I wrote 28 books. Always I demanded the highest fees I could get, becoming in the end what counts as a rich writer, and further on in this memoir I talk a good deal about contracts, advances, money. Most writers spend most of their lives locked in small rooms typing, and they don’t get paid very much. I refused to live like that. Throughout I have tried to manage my career in a different way, call it my way, if you like. I know no other professional writer who can say this. Year after year I chose to plunge down every road that opened before me, often heedlessly. I started my adult life as the Football Giants’ press agent, the first they had ever had and the first job I had ever had, six seasons--at the same time writing many stories and two novels no one would publish. Later, after I at last broke through, I wrote a novel based on the Giants and on players I had known, which, in 2002, Sports Illustrated called “one of the top sports books of all time.” I was six years a New York Times foreign correspondent in Europe, and later wrote a novel about that. Much later I served as an NYPD Deputy Commissioner, ducking under the yellow tape to get as close to the crime scenes as possible, and on that experience I based a number of the novels that were to come. I wrote also about bullfighting, opera, grand prix racing, France, wine, treasure diving, for I plunged into all those worlds as well, plunged all the way to the end if possible, where I stood around gawking for a time, then wrote as accurately as I could, whether in fiction or non-fiction about what I had found. There is a price exacted of those who ignore traffic signs. I paid it in fear, defeat, humiliation, even in lawsuits. But other times I reaped an incredible profusion of excitement and delight—and also made a good living. To keep my enthusiasm high, I had to keep discovering new worlds, new people, for otherwise writing is hard, hard, hard, sometimes impossible. There were so many strange doors out there, all of them strangely ajar, at least to a writer. One had only to lean a little and they would open and whatever was behind them would be revealed. It’s all in this book. This is my story."
Visit the author's Website: robertdaleyauthor.com. Or contact him on Facebook.
