Real events in fiction…

When I read Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, I was impressed at the get-go because the author starts with real events—the war with Algeria waged by France under DeGaulle—and continues the plot from there to make a tense, taut thriller. Other thrillers by the same author often followed the same scheme.

Mixing real events into our fiction can help make the fiction seem more real. If the author can get the reader thinking, “Could this really happen?” or even “This could really happen,”...