Plot is taking all the things that don’t make sense about your story, and forcing them to make sense.
How do we know that we're writing something good, and not just tossing words on a page?
It's such a tempting idea, this sudden mental switch or a realization-from-on-high -- for reasons that are often hard to explain and sometimes so totally otherworldly that you can barely explain them to yourself, let alone write a story about them for other people -- you're a different person than you were before.
I'll try to answer a few questions about the craft of being creative.
When you want to write straight out of your heart that keeps all that passion and fire and rawness and fragility intact, it's a good thing to tell yourself, I'm not doing this to make money.
The religious stuff, the Holocaust stuff, the passing inclusion of an oy — they’re all a part of the story, but are they the story?
