Hemingway, The Writer, The Man

"When you first start writing stories in the first person if the stories are made so real that people believe them the people reading them nearly always think the stories really happened to you.  That is natural because while you are making them up you had to make them happen to the person who was telling them.  If you do this successfully enough you make the person who is reading them believe that the things happened to him too.  If you can do this you are beginning to get what you are trying for which is to make the story so real beyond any reality that it will become a part of the reader's experience and a part of his memory.  There must be things that he did not notice when he read the story or the novel which  without his knowing it, enter into his memory and experience so that they are a part of his life.  This is not easy to do."

~from, Ernest Hemingway's unpublished manuscripts from the Kennedy Library collection, Roll 19, T 178