No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn’t yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.

Doyle is stressing the boundary between lived experience and crafted narrative. Even when a writer begins with autobiography, the act of shaping events into a story quickly carries the material beyond what is strictly “true” or owned by the author. At that point, factual verification matters less than the artistic choices—voice, diction, rhythm, and structure—that make the narrative convincing and meaningful. The quote also implies an ethical and aesthetic humility: personal experience is not a private monopoly once it becomes art, and the writer’s responsibility shifts from reporting to composing. In Doyle’s view, the “rightness” of language is what ultimately gives a story its authority.