The mosaic is greater than the sum of its tesserae...but the tesserae are pretty important, too

No additional commentary needed, as this passage from The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, really says it best and says it well.

"To become a story, the details of ... what happened in real time, in real history, to a real person, would have to be subordinated to the overall outline that already existed, for whatever idiosyncratic reasons of personality and preference and taste... the way that the small stones or tesserae used by ancient Greek and Roman artisans were set into grout or cement according to a design of the artist's invention, a design without which (the artist would tell you) the tesserae themselves -- which would be glittering semiprecious stones, onyx or quartz or jasper, or merely homely bits of local stone -- were nothing, in the end, but attractive bits of rock.

Another way of saying this is that proximity brings you closer to what happened, is responsible for the facts we glean, the artifacts we possess, the verbatim quotations of what people said; but distance is what makes possible the story of what happened, is precisely what gives someone the freedom to organize and shape those bits into a pleasing and coherent whole -- to, for example, take three separate quotations, made by one person over the course of three nights, and string them together because when strung together in this fashion they create a dramatic effect far more powerful than they could possibly make if you were to encounter them in three successive chapters of a book" (p. 437).