I Think Tone Gives Birth To The

My Mother, For Example, Told The German Officer Not To Kill Her. She'd Make It Worth His While. And Then, When They Were Doing It, She Pulled A Knife Out Of Her Belt And Sliced Open His Chest, Just Like She Used To Open Chicken Breasts To Stuff With Rice For The Sabbath Meal.

In America, Where Writers Are Preoccupied With The Craft Of Writing, I Always Try To Introduce This Concept Of The Badly Written Good Story. Turning The Hierarchy Around And Putting Passion On Top And Not Craft, Because When You Just Focus On Craft, You Can Write Something That Is Very Sterile.

What Happens When You Speak Colloquial Hebrew Is You Switch Between Registers All The Time. So In A Typical Sentence, Three Words Are Biblical, One Word Is Russian, And One Word Is Yiddish. This Kind Of Connection Between Very High Language And Very Low Language Is Very Natural, People Use It All The Time.

And She Loved A Man Who Was Made Out Of Nothing. A Few Hours Without Him And Right Away She’d Be Missing Him With Her Whole Body, Sitting In Her Office Surrounded By Polyethylene And Concrete And Thinking Of Him. And Every Time She’d Boil Water For Coffee In Her Ground-floor Office, She’d Let The Steam Cover Her Face, Imagining It Was Him Stroking Her Cheeks, Her Eyelids And She’d Wait For The Day To Be Over, So She Could Go To Her Apartment Building, Climb The Flight Of Stairs, Turn The Key In The Door, And Find Him Waiting For Her, Naked And Still Between The Sheets Of Her Empty Bed.

I Rarely Return To Characters. My Characters, At Least Most Of Them, Are Much More A Part Of That Superorganism That Is The Story Than Separate And Independent Creatures.