If you don't fail now and again, it's a sign you're playing it safe. I always use people I know. I tell them they'll make a marvellous story. From characters who inhabit a fictional world, we gain a better understanding of reality. If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.
Every story is completed by the reader.
I'm just a bespectacled novelist who dreamed all this up. The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it. Because it isn't there. I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die. The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.