How did Hayden White argue that the same events can be turned into different true historical narratives?

Hayden White argued that historical narratives are not merely objective accounts of facts, but are constructed through a process that inevitably introduces a fictive element. While a historian must ensure that individual statements within a narrative are true and supported by evidence, the way these facts are organized into a story relies on literary techniques common to generic narratives.1

White contended that the same set of historical events can be "emplotted" in various ways, such as a comedy, a romance, or a tragedy, depending on the tropes and narrative structures the historian employs. Because these different narratives can each consist entirely of true statements, they cannot be dismissed on purely empirical grounds. Consequently, White proposed that a variety of true, yet distinct, historical accounts can be written about the same events. This variety is considered inevitable because there is no universally accepted "master narrative" that could synthesize these different interpretations into a single, overarching history.1