I was struck by how often my students’ gropings led to a sudden revelation of the proper path, obvious to everyone in the room. 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
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