Dermott Hayes's Blog: Postcard from a Pigeon, page 24

Don’t Be a Dick: Colum McCann’s Advice to Young Writers

Source: Literary Hub from Letters to a Young Writer (Random House) by Colum McCann

I. Don’t Be a Dick

Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.

–Henry James

Hey, you. Over there in the corner. Yeah, you, with that half-assed grin. Don’t turn away, I know that grin, I’ve worn it myself. Listen up. Yeah, you. Half-listening but pretending not to. Don’t get too attached to the romantic illusions of yourself. You hear me? Yeah, you over there with the tilted chin. Listen up. Save yourself from yourself.

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PRUDENT

 

She has the world at her feet, she can command whatever price she wants because her talents, the critics say, is immeasurable. So when she sets up her own corporation with publishing, script writing and audio-visual arms, some people say she is foolish. The smart ones say she is prudent.

PAUSE

 

The path is clear but he waits. It’s a dark. cloudy evening. The moon, momentarily unshackled, casts deep shadows among the poplar pathway. He waits. A light breeze gusts a funnel of brush, dust and leaves. The cat emerges, strolls languorously, out of sight. The mouse sighs, happy to pause.

 

Stephen King on Donald Trump: ‘How do such men rise? First as a joke’

He’s written novels with eerily similar plotlines – but how did Trump become president? The only way to find out: inject a panel of fictional voters with truth serum…

by Stephen King in THE GUARDIAN

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PASSPORT

 

She feels free if not entirely painless. Spending half her adolescence teetering on her mother’s heels, working her way from sensible hockey ref to drop dead diva with six inch stilettos, her calves twinged, her toes cramped. The man at the desk doesn’t buy it.

Damn, that’s old me’s passport.

FORTUNE

 

Fortune neither favours the brave nor rewards the diligent or prepared when it’s always measured in hindsight. To be fully prepared for any venture and anticipate disaster or mishap, that might reduce the chance of misfortune and thereby increase the odds for success. The best result is measured by success.

TERRITORY

 

Caught with spray can paint and a mask stuffed in his knapsack, James figured the game was up but he wasn’t going down without a fight. The magistrate asked what a man with his education – a degree in animal behaviour – was doing spraying graffiti? ‘I was marking my territory, Justice’.

Man with 4 right shoes

This the story of a man with, temporarily, one foot in action, four right shoes in service. I took my first step out, today, wearing two shoes, left and right. What a trip.

ELIXIR

 

She didn’t drink, as a general rule, perhaps a glass of wine at social occasions but when the opportunity arose and she had her catch trussed up on a hook, a vein slit enough for a consistent drip, she loved a warm cup, the elixir of death, she called it.

SYMBIOSIS

 

If  public perception of reality has been distorted by decades of Hollywood movies, fake news, alternative facts, corporate greed and the 21st century’s version of a man in a white hat, the superhero, then it’s easy to understand why a megalomaniac president and terrorists like ISIS are a perfect symbiosis.