Do you have un-swept rooms in your mind like I do? Are there crumbs of unresolved disputes, dust bunnies filled with longing, or shadows that chase you in your dreams? Un-swept rooms can make good fodder for fiction. I have long suspected fiction was where “real” truth existed, if at all.  We may call nonfiction truth, but that’s tricky.  Like memory and even history, all stories are interpretations of events more than factual recounting.  When we try to tell what we perceive is truth, we can’t help making it more, not the hero catches big fish necessarily but a better story.  And it’s the job of storytellers to do just that, regardless of form.  I don’t subscribe to the “write what you know best” theory, but I do think all writers should look inside themselves as they explore the subjects that become their stories.  Imagining other ways of being may begin with teasing out an idea or with what children call make believe.  Finding a deeper truth may mean a particularly difficult unraveling of skeletons in our own closets and capturing a set of circumstances in a different way.  Un-swept rooms? I presume we all of us have them.