As I’ve been revising my novel, particular situations have been reminding me of all the rules I’ve ever used and heard about writing fiction, and one of these is what I call the “it really happened” defence.
The “it really happened” excuse is the one bad writers (and I guess sometimes some good writers too) use when a passage in a story sounds unbelievable to the reader, but the writer won’t change it because it’s something they’ve modeled on personal experience and they therefore know, for certain, that it is possible …