On blogging and telling tales

There seem to be three rules to blogging
1.  Keep it short
2.  Write often
3.  Have something to say

So far I seem to be breaking the rules.  Well here's my second offer, sparked off by reading an extract from Jeanette Winterson's autobiography in the Guardian Weekend Review, which set me off thinking about history.

In commenting on her first fictionalised account of her early life, Winterson said "adoption drops you into the story after it has started.  It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing.  It's like arriving after curtain up.  The feeling that something is missing never leaves you - and it can't, and it shouldn't because something is missing.  It's why I am a writer - I don't say "decided" to be, or "became".  It was not an act of will or even a conscious choice.  To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson's story I had to be able to tell my own." 

There is a general truth here about the stories we tell about ourselves, and the difficulty we have in disentangling them from others that run alongside or threaten to displace our own.  This seems equally true of history.  Reading back into the nineteenth century primary sources,  I find myself stumbling over a multitude of others' stories, whose shapes I cannot fully understand, nor fully trace.  Where to look to discover the start or find the end?   Pulling at one thread, others unravel alongside.

I am not sure if this is a product of coming to the discipline from other traditions, or whether it is a recognised problem within history.  Certainly dealing with the secondary sources intensifies the problem.  Data is there, clues are scattered, but they are already tied into a particular sequence and narrative frame.  How to reframe the evidence without arguing back.  Does history deal with this as a methodological problem and if so how?  I can't find these points directly addressed within the discipline, though the potential truth of the many different kinds of stories created are openly acknowleged.   I'm intrigued to know if historians would recognise the dilemma or have a response to my questions.