Fiction and Non-fiction's very separate contracts

The challenge is to accept fiction's influence, to study and apply its narrative means, without ever adopting its poetic license. Fiction and nonfiction, you see, establish very separate contracts with a reader. Nonfiction promises accuracy, to the greatest degree humanly possible, and in return has the power of actuality. No matter how implausible an event or an action, the nonfiction author can fairly to a reader, But that's what really happened. Fiction does not enjoy the escape catch of implausible fact.

Samuel Freedman, Letters to a Young Journalist, p. 128