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 it's probably better to make a region your own, and then maybe you can go somewhere else, but a lot of great writers have stuck to one region.

Of course I'd sometimes have characters from downstate living upstate, but it took a while for me to start writing about where I grew up.

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

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.

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

Being a reporter took me out of myself and that shaped me as a writer.