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.
How do we know that we're writing something good, and not just tossing words on a page?
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.
I'll try to answer a few questions about the craft of being creative.
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?
Plot is taking all the things that don’t make sense about your story, and forcing them to make sense.