Evidence? What constitutes evidence?
Oral accounts may be deliberately or accidentally or ignorantly inaccurate.
Summaries of troves of information are partial, incomplete, and possibly in author -conjured relational structures.
How are the different parts of the report related to one another?
What is the evidence for those imputed relationships?
And how does one detect and differentiate the relational structures of the description from that of the situation being described?
Whether the written word, visual image, or recording, at best there is only partial representation, and highly selective representation at that.
That truth is stranger than fiction, even if only occasionally, pretty well discounts strangeness for sorting out the two.
But where does the fictionalization of the accounts stop?
Beyond conversation and other ephemera, the author cannot possibly know the full extent of the elements bearing on the individual’s actions and thoughts, let alone those that may be dominant.
Motivation, desire, affective state can only be hypothesized.
It is only in fiction that these things can be arguably true, where the author is describing an imagined state that is entirely of his or her creation.
Thus, only fiction can be non-fiction.
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