Fiction means "it ain't real." That sounds like "enuff said" but of course the point of it is to make it sound believable and, if the writer is good, sometimes some pretty wild things make you look up and wonder what happened to Kansas.

Actually, there is another way to approach fiction -- it's called "bio-fiction" and you're familiar with it from things like "All the Presiden'ts Men," "The DaVinci Code," historical romances, and so on. In bio-fiction the author takes real people, and real events, and uses them to spin his story.

Right now I'm finishing the first chapter of what I hope will become a good BDSM novel featuring myself, my submissive, and real people I know both on and offline. It is taking all of my over 30 years of experience as a writer to deal with the material. The problem is in two parts -- first of all, life is stranger than fiction and no one would find believable many of the things that really happen ... so they have to be "watered down" or reformatted; the other problem is that all of us are really too "boring" to be very exciting in fiction, so we have to be spruced up and reformatted.

That wasn't a direct answer to your question, but several other people did that, and I hope I put a little different slant on it for you.

Good reading!
hJ