But what I realized when I was looking back at them was that no matter how different they are, they're still coming from me, and they're still coming from my brain and my set of obsessions. I think that no matter how different I tried to make them, there were just these certain questions that I just kept circling back to as I was writing. I think they were the ones I was really swept up in in that decade.

It is more important to just be as honest as I can about my characters than to write some really great sentence.

So in the drafting process, whenever I would discover something about what my character wanted or didn't want, I immediately just wanted my character to admit to that so I could get to the next, more interesting level in the story.

For so many of my characters, they were political in their own countries and they risked their lives for certain political beliefs that they had, only to be brought to America where they're not treated like Americans - they're just not really treated like anything.

So if there was a way that I knew something about my character's desires or the things that they were resisting because I was saving it for some grand epiphany moment for my readers, I just feel like that's when you can feel the machine at work in a story. That's when you can feel the writer pulling the strings of the puppet.

So it was doing all this research or going to the archives or doing all these interviews or traveling, and then trying as much as I can to delete all of that research in a later draft so that all the reader cares about is the characters.

I knew that I was writing for an American audience and that if I sold foreign rights, they would retranslate the book to make it make sense to that language. But one thing that was really important to me was not to italicize any of the words in the languages that were in the stories, because I feel like those foreign words felt just as important and integral to the story as everything else, so I wanted it all to just exist as its own thing.