There have been a few times after I’ve written a scene in a story when I would doubt the believability of the scenario I have concocted, only for a real-life scenario to make my fiction far more believable than I would have ever predicted.

Take, for example, the first novel I ever published, Coffee-to-Go. In it, I depict a corrupt Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. My main character, Leo, gets detained and threatened with deportation because he can’t immediately prove he’s an A...