January 29, 2006

"Your Write Time"

If your New Year's resolution is to write, pack a pencil and paper and come prepared to do just that with Tom Barbash, author of the novel The Last Good Chance and The New York Times' bestselling On Top of the World, a non-fiction account of a New York bond firm that lost hundreds of employees on 9/11.

At this month's meeting Tom will take us through writing drills he teaches at Stanford University and in the graduate writing workshop at California College of Arts and Craft.

A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Tom won the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction and the James Michener Award for The Last Good Chance, of which National Book Award winner Jonathan Franzen wrote, "Tom Barbash brings fresh seriousness and sympathy and wit to bear on the ancient problem of loyalty. This is an ambitious, deftly plotted, multifariously satisfying piece of genuine American realism."

In the attacks of September 11, 2001, 658 of brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald's 1,000 Manhattan employees were killed. Immediately following, Tom headed to New York to profile his college friend Howard Lutnick, Cantor's CEO, and the firm's struggles to stay in business and help its employees' families. An Amazon.com reviewer called the result, On Top of the World, "a compulsively readable book that is difficult to categorize."

"Write dialogue with subtext. We too often write directly about things, which people speaking never do."

"Create a chain of logic with your characters even when they do despicable things, so the reader can say, 'I'm not like that.'"

"Put aside those things that make you a good person, and keep writing when you reach that point when you are uncomfortable."

"When your character is in a state, in a spiked situation, that's when things finally get interesting."

"Be one of those persons on whom nothing is lost."