Nonfiction is at its best an act of putting the world back together—or tearing some piece of it apart to find what’s hidden beneath the assumptions or conventions—and in this sense creation and destruction can be akin. The process can be incandescent with excitement, whether from finding some unexpected scrap of information or from recognizing the patterns that begin to arise as the fragments begin to assemble. Something you didn’t know well comes into focus, and the world makes sense in a new way, or an old assumption is gutted, and then you try to write it down.
