A man would say that he wanted to try a piece about the town where he once lived and would venture a possible approach: “I could write about X.” X, however, was uninteresting, even to him, lacking any distinctiveness, and so were Y and Z, and so were P and Q and R, the writer continuing to dredge up fragments of his life, when, almost accidentally, he stumbled into M, a long-forgotten memory, seemingly unimportant but unassailably true, encapsulating in one incident everything that had made him want to write about the town in the first place. “There’s your story,” several people in the class
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