If you’re like me, when you read historical fiction or see a movie “based on true events,” you want to know which parts of the story are actual and factual and which parts are made up or even false! The accounts of the “lynching of Ah Quong Tai” I found in books were at the most, six to eight pages long, and a good portion of those pages were photographs and maps. Writing 250-page historical novel required filling in many large holes. There are so many things we just don’t know. The skeleton of the plot of my novel is factual. I’ve been known to say that the plot is the best part of my story, and I did not write that part. When filling in the blanks of the story, I tried to write what was possible or even probable, for the most part, from what I did know from the historical records. 

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Click on the PDF icon to the right to view this "Fact from Fiction" resource.