On the other hand, experience never hurt a writer either, and if you can get it you might use it someday. House of Sand and Fog was inspired partly by true events. A lot of times with my fiction I can't trace the roots, but with this one I can. I was teaching a writing class at Emerson College, trying to get these students going, and I get great ideas from the newspaper. Usually the local news section has fragmented stories and one of these stories was about a woman who had been evicted from her house for failure to pay taxes she did not owe, and the county realized its mistake and were willing to rescind the sale, but the new owner wouldn't.
Someone ought to write that.
And my friend from college, her father was an Iranian colonel and he did know the Shah, and they did terrible things. I remember seeing him fumble in the United States, couldn't find a job, and ended up working at a convenience store. This was a man who used to be standing with kings and queens. And I thought that was incredibly dramatic. I took a few stabs at writing about him, I think I wrote a poem about him.