From time to time someone asks me (as, no doubt, they ask other writers) why I do it. Why, specifically, I write fiction as opposed to nonfiction. It really is hard to explain to those who seem tone-deaf to what we call Art. Sometimes it’s hard to explain to yourself. The short answer for me is that I love it. I love creating stories and weird stuff and making up plots, because I always loved stories. (When I was a kid, I’d watch movies in which a group of people are thrust into a really cool adventure and at some point one of them would talk about wanting to just go home and having everything return to normal. …