I gave the name Capote to the scholar who had translated the document, because Truman Capote, author of Breakfast at Tiffany's, had pioneered modern versions of this ancient technique in his book, In Cold Blood, about a multiple murder in a Kansan farmhouse. That book was neither fiction nor pure documentary, so the commentators dubbed it faction. He used the form of fictional narrative, including imaginative reconstructions of lengthy, unrecorded conversations, to get inside the complexity of a hideous event. In a modest way, my Christmas sermon in 1993 was a similar exercise. The Hebrew word for this technique is midrash, from a verb meaning to search out, to seek, to enquire.
All religious traditions develop a literature of imaginative responses to their sacred canon.
Screwtape Letters is a good example. This book, one of the most famous Lewis wrote, purports to be letters from a junior demon to his supervisor, about his work of tempting a hapless human. There is a lot of midrash, or imaginative construction of this sort, in the New Testament. If we want to understand the bible properly, we have to read it within its own literary conventions. For example, most scholars believe today that the whole of John's Gospel is midrash, an imaginative theological construction that is the fruit of years of meditating on the meaning of Jesus.