I'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.

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.

I always tell my students to write the story all the way through, not to play with the language and fall in love with sentences that you then have to cut. I actually find that really difficult to do; there's something so demoralizing about looking at a pile of not very great sentences. As I ease into writing every morning, I tweak a sentence and then tweak a paragraph.

I'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.

The stories I love the most are where the author has a lot of empathy for everyone. The author loves their characters and takes their situations really seriously, and you feel like you're just dropped into a different world.

I felt like if I could get the epiphany out of the way in my drafting process, through my eighth or tenth draft, then that can just be part of how I've assembled the character, and then we can move on and move forward with it. In general, I don't ever want to feel smarter than my characters, because I just feel like that's not a great way to write a story.

Raymond Carver had the quote that I loved about how he felt that a short story was the moment right before someone's life was about to fall apart. You can't really do that with a novel, but with a story you're just left hanging.