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How can different historical narratives be written from the same set of true events?

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Neo-Assyrian clay tablet from the 7th century BC inscribed with dense cuneiform writing, known as the Flood Tablet from the Epic of Gilgamesh, displayed in the British Museum. — epigraphy The Flood Tablet, 11th cuneiform tablet in a series relating the Gilgamesh epic, from Nineveh, 7th century bce; in the British Museum, London.

Different historical narratives can be constructed from the same set of true events because the process of writing history involves more than just establishing facts; it requires interpretation, explanation, and the construction of a narrative framework.1

While historians strive for accuracy, they must select from a vast mass of material, a process that inherently requires them to assign relative importance and significance to specific events. Because these attributions cannot be read directly from the facts, they depend on the historian's own critical standards, moral perspectives, or political standpoints.2

Furthermore, as noted by Hayden White, historians inevitably introduce a fictive element when organizing true statements into a narrative. By employing common literary tropes, metaphors, and "emplotment" strategies—such as framing a series of events as a comedy, tragedy, or romance—historians can produce multiple, empirically valid narratives from the same data. Because there is no universally accepted "master narrative" to unify these interpretations, and because historical language often carries normative connotations, a variety of true histories can coexist, each reflecting different ways of conceptualizing and assigning meaning to the past.12