When life is too bizzare to be believed as fiction

My life has been pretty eventful and I've met people who are amazing characters. I'm taking a short story class and adding bits of my life into my stories and it's funny to listen to the class's disbelief that such things can happen. They tell me I need to change my stories.

They also think I'm far more creative than I am. I get really embarrased when I'm praised for just writing down what I saw, but often don't want to share the real story that inspired me. Some of it is personal or unbelievable.

Does anyone else have to tone down the people and events from their real lives, before they can add them to fiction?

This helps. Thanks!

Okay, tell me if I'm getting this right?

Fiction is so much tidier than real life. Fiction supplies all of the 5ws, including "why?". I need to make sure I'm fleshing out the facts with enough fiction to make the story complete, even if the story was not complete in real life.

If in real life, I was confused, overwhelmed, and blown away by an event, there is no place for that in my fiction. I must wrestle it into something that makes sense. I must finish the story that was started in real life.

They HATED my last attempt more than the first :-( Instead of the unbelievable character being a support character depicted in 3rd person, I tried making the unbelievable character the main character written in 1st person. Being in the head of and centering on the unbelievable character did not make him believable to them. Trying to add details and attempting "why" just magnified the problem.

The teacher kept telling me to listen to children and I'll see how flawed my previous observations are. I don't want to listen to "normal" children. That's not what I'm writing about. She denied that is what she is telling me to do :-0 One student talked about how unreliable memories are Ugh! Another thinks I need to write memoirs for awhile. NO! I don't want to out anyone.

At first I thought I could think of their comments at least as accurate as a person on the street, but my friend told me that isn't so. Writers in training and certain types of teachers are NOT typical readers. My friend thinks my stories are hilarious, but she has met a few of the children who inspired my characters, and others like them, so she isn't an average reader either. She knows children like this exist.

I wonder if it is more difficult to make the bizarre believable in a short, than it is a novel. The first five pages hooks the reader, so maybe it's critical not to bring in the bizarre until the reader is hooked.