Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist. I don't mean there's never any overlap. You learn things in one area and bring them into another area. But giving a speech against racism is not the same as writing a novel. But when you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question.
Life is more complicated than that.
Reality simply consists of different points of view. When I wrote Alias Grace , for example, about Canada's famous 19th-century convicted murderer Grace Marks, I knew there were some things that weren't true about this historical figure. After all my research, I still do not know who killed Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. Someone killed them. To say that we don't know exactly who did it is not to say that nobody killed them.