Pushing the limits

As my writing buddy Dave commented once, "You have a lot of balls to write this stuff. This is great." Tackling an historic, factual event in the context of writing fiction can be challenging. Doing so with an unafraid narrator can be liberating.
Here's the secret about writing: You hire a narrator to tell the story and let him or her do the work. Maybe you can't write about sex, because your mother (or friend, or husband, or boss) might read it and be upset. But your narrator, that free-wheeling hussy you've entrusted with the story, can do it. Some of the best narrators are unreliable, slanting things to put themselves in the best light or to obscure their own participation in an event. That can be loads of fun for the reader - and the writer - as you try to figure out what really happened, as opposed to what appears to have happened.
Doing exercises is part of this process, the way to get into the story. So, I may want to write about a murdered brother and a flawed sister who's trying to figure out what happened. And I may write it in a very distant, almost God-like, third person. Can be very formal this way, can be a camera swooping down from great heights and zeroing in on a scene or conversation. Or alternatively, a first-person narrator can tell the story, but his or her perspective is limited and has its own agenda. So the sister telling the story is different from the police detective, is different from the newspaper reporter, is different from the mother. And each one of those has a very interesting thing to offer the writer, a very different take on the story. Using these exercises to arrive at a "complete" story is one way in which you decide what is the best way to tell it (you usually have to pick just one), and yet knowing about all the other stories provides a multi-layered perspective that deepens the telling - no matter who is chosen as the narrator.
So, in conclusion, when I write "I" in a story, rest assured that it is not me but my narrator whose voice and experience colors the manner in which she tells the tale.