It's all in the telling

This weekend, I saw the Cleopatra exhibit at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Cleopatra VII's life was full of story-worthy material: she married two of her brothers and her three-year-old son, had children by Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, spoke several languages, wrote books, outwitted several political plots, and ultimately lost a war and committed suicide. If a writer can't find material there, s/he just isn't trying.

Of course, you could hand the above paragraph to 50 different wri...