I don't know why we always do this but we do.  We go looking for the true story behind the novel we just read & enjoyed precisely because it felt true.  What we like is believing ​in a whole and contained world with solid walls and living people.  And yet we ask: where'd you get the idea?  And the author can't just say, "Well, it all happened."  

As a reader of literary biographies and interviews with writers and the acknowledgment pages at the backs of novels, I confess that I'm always picking apart the story to find the true parts and the made-up parts and the Terrible Childhood Events that inspired fiction. Even that isn't enough. I like to go stand in the very places where the transformation from life to fiction occurred: to stand on sacred ground in Key West or Chawton or Rome and stare at the holy typewriter or handwritten manuscript page.

When you're writing historical fiction, the sacred moments are the ones when you come across a photograph, artifact, or place that feels inhabited--haunted, really--and you hope somehow to hold out a wick to that still-burning candle and use it to light your book.  That's what these pictures show: the candle flames. to read  THE PRACTICE HOUSE