History vs Fiction

The comparison of Thucydides’ and Defoe’s accounts of the plague is reliant upon the type of literature that each one is created for. While one is seen as a fiction and another as an accurate description of the history of the plague, my opinion is that they are both more similar than they are different. I believe that both of these accounts are a fictional depiction of real life events, as they both tend to rely on history, as well as their own interpretation of what happened at the time, which to me is imagination. Whether it’s adding a few words to an existing historical fact, or creating a character that is suffering through the misery of being among the infected, both of these share the foundation of true events, with the addition of the writer’s own spin on the matter. My question is, what makes a human influenced writing piece different from a story? Aren’t they both dependent on the style of the writer to get the point across? How do we know that historical work over time has not been manipulated by the way that it has been written?

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