Here’s one way of looking at the process of writing a nonfiction book. You start with a theory about your subject, be it a sports team, an economic phenomenon, an object, a quirk in child psychology, or, in my case, a long-dead Russian revolutionary. Then you spend months or years or decades trying to find out everything you can about the subject.
Naturally, the stuff we’re most interested in is fresh discoveries. What can I find out about this subject that nobody else knows? But these kinds of revelations are rare. So if that sort of knowledge isn’t available, the next best category exists in a sort of Goldilocks space: information that is strange and surprising enough about the person you’re interested in that it substantially complicates the theory you hold in your head about them, but not so strange and surprising that it completely undermines that theory and, thus, the premise of your book.
