How did Hayden White argue that different narratives can be made from the same historical events?

Hayden White argued that historians inevitably introduce a fictive element when constructing historical narratives. While a narrative should consist of statements that are consonant with the available evidence, the historian must organize these facts using the same tropes, metaphors, and plot structures found in literature and generic storytelling.1

White contended that the same set of historical events can be "emplotted" in various ways—for instance, one historian might frame a series of events as a comedy, while another interprets the same occurrences as a romance. Because these different narratives can each be composed entirely of true statements, they are not necessarily vulnerable to empirical refutation. Consequently, White concluded that a variety of true histories can be written about the same events, a situation he viewed as inevitable in the absence of a universally accepted master narrative to unify them.1