“It was not only that false biographies tended to overshadow true ones, they obscured a hard fact that all fiction writers know – which is simply that real life is far less believable than fiction. That is in fact part of the power of nonfiction narratives. To take details from “real life” into fiction and make them believable requires careful work: creating characters the reader can believe would do the unbelievable and setting up a scene where those events make some kind of sense.”
