"The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don’t know and find something out."

Says T.C. Boyle, with this specific example of his approach to story writing. He'd heard of about an incident in which a man and his wife came home drunk after a party, and the man "crept back out, dressed all in black and donning a black ski mask... climb[ed] up the side of a cabin belonging to a single woman and peep[ed] through the second-story window."

Unfortunately for him (and fortunately for me) he was discovered and unmasked and the repercussions began to play themselves out. Now, I don’t know the people involved in that incident and I don’t want to know them. All I want, from that story or any other, is to hear a single resonant bar of truth or mystery or what-if-ness so I can hum it back and play a riff on it.

Key line: I don’t want to know them.