A long time ago, I took a writing class. One of those in-a-church-basement things that the Gotham Writer’s Workshop puts on in midtown. About a month ago I was going through old teaching materials and found my notebook from the class.

This was the first in-class exercise. Our directions were to write a story about a character named Bibber.

During college I often got lost in Manhattan.

Whenever we all went out to dinner or a show, I had to just follow the crowd — they always seemed to know which way to turn when they came out of the subway or from which sidewalk to hail the taxi — I often took the uptown train instead of the down and always had to ask for directions. …