I was 100% the kid calculating grandma’s lost years, hah.

Strangely, it was my later-developed empathy that drove me so strongly to fact-searching. Whenever I saw someone in pain, I wanted to understand them from their point of view, of course, but then I wanted to go find facts to help others with less patience understand, too.

I think as writers, we can feel when we’re wrong (at least to our knowledge), both factually and socially. As people, we need to be better at entertaining the idea that we’re probably wrong on both fronts a lot of the time, we just haven’t been found out yet.