Picking Your Story

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One of the best definitions of what a writer does is to extract narrative from random events.  Okay, I guess that applies mostly to non-fiction writers.

Say you set out to write the biography of one of the English fighters in the peninsula during the Napoleonic invasions.  You’ll find there’s not one narrative but at least four or five.  And I don’t mean just that this guy looks completely different in his auto-biography, his mentions in his superiors’ biographies, or his friends memories of...