Tom Barbash Quotes

I tend to listen to my friends and family empathetically, and I try to help work through their problems from the inside. I try to adopt their thinking.

I think the second, or outsider's, perspective can come as you layer a story. It's as though you've grabbed a secondary character and asked them, "What do you make of this guy?" and the hope is that the answer surprises you as the writer.

My characters tend, if wounded, to be emotionally resourceful. Often they're in that way station between when loss happens and when it can be fully comprehended. In the meantime they're fighting to get something back, and occasionally they prevail in surprising ways.

I went back into the older stories and reworked them, because I became a better writer over the years and could spot flaws. I loved having another chance to make them stronger, and to bring them closer to me, made them less like a greatest hits compilation, and more like something written in the same extended burst.

I'm always relearning things I thought I'd learned for good a while back.

When I teach, I try to assign writers from whom I can learn.

I think narrators expect a high level of intimacy with their readers, and vice versa.

I had written about a small hamlet upstate, and had been called into a meeting about my story, which, as it turned out, had upset a lot of people.

I think one's person's unlikeable is another's lovable.

I'm suspicious of epiphanies, because they so rarely last.