“So, to tell a few truths I can’t manage in any other way, I tell a larger lie. I make fiction. But sometimes, when I’m lucky, I find out that in the process of telling that big lie, I tell more truth than I set out to. When I’m luckiest, I tell myself things even I didn’t know.”
-Emma Bull
(Sorry, I stayed up ’til 1am getting the chapter down. At least now I know who the unexpected corpse was, even if my characters don’t yet. So you get a quote that speaks to me, but not a post unpacking it.
Because I still have get laundry done, and re-wrap the knee, trim the cats’ claws, and then set my characters loose in a souk looking for answers.)
Mad Genius Club 
As Aristotle observed, fiction is more philosophical than history, because history is contaminated with all kinds of accidents (or so it looks to us). In fiction, the principles can be shown working out without such mess.
Yow! That’s . . . true. Sometimes we try to put random stuff in there just to make it more realistic.
I love those late nights when the right things finally come out and the satisfaction of capturing them in words is done.
The zombie-like next day, not so much, although I’m usually still happy to have tied down that critical scene.
Fiction has to make sense. Life . . . doesn’t have to. It can be easier to see and tell Truth in fiction than to tease it out of everything that happens in Real Time, swirling around us.
OTOH, we mere writers and story tellers can’t beat readers over the head with Truth because most readers won’t come back. We have to be sneaky, most of the time. (Like pilling cats, but without the need for blood transfusions afterwards.)