Life & Wisdom Quote by Evan Hunter

Hunter is staking out a contrarian ethic: the serious writer doesn’t chase the noise; he hunts what the noise can’t metabolize. On the surface, he’s dismissing “headlines” as raw material. Underneath, he’s diagnosing a built-in redundancy. If an event is genuinely big, journalism has already turned it into a public commodity with a prepackaged narrative arc, a cast of characters, and a moral. Writing fiction straight off that scaffolding risks producing a secondhand echo: derivative, late, and trapped inside the media’s framing.

The second clause is the sharper blade. If the story isn’t “good enough,” then it’s not worth the writer’s attention anyway. That sounds snobbish until you recognize the implied critique of how headlines are manufactured: many “events” are not revelations about human nature so much as attention economies doing their daily churn. Hunter is arguing for selectivity as a form of artistic hygiene.

Context matters. As Evan Hunter and, famously, Ed McBain, he worked in a genre (crime, police procedurals) that’s often accused of being ripped from the front page. He flips that assumption. The procedural’s power isn’t topicality; it’s systems, routine, and the quiet psychology of people trapped in institutions. News gives you the spike; fiction needs the undertow.

The intent, then, is less anti-journalism than anti-fashion. He’s defending the writer’s job as excavation, not transcription: find the private motives, the recurring pressures, the durable conflicts that remain after the headlines move on.