It is more important to just be as honest as I can about my characters than to write some really great sentence.
Molly AntopolFor 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.
Molly AntopolSo 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.
Molly AntopolI'm not Israeli and because I'm not a citizen, it doesn't matter how often I go there - I'm still not Israeli. There's this way I feel so close to so many people there, but I always feel like I'm staring through the glass. And in a way, having this really thin piece of glass between me and this place is incredibly useful for me as a writer, because I'm just so hyper-aware of it. I could take a walk in San Francisco and probably notice a third of the things that I would notice in Israel, because I'm just attuned to everything when I'm there.
Molly AntopolSo 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.
Molly Antopol