Fun Facts, Trivia, and Storytelling: The Best Part of Writing (and reading)

Here’s a pop quiz for you:

Could vitamin D deficiency have caused the dinosaurs to go extinct 65 million years ago?

Do we owe much of our metabolic powers and energy dynamics to ancient bacteria?

How did two Siberian huskies save thousands of children from dying of diphtheria more than one hundred years ago in Nome, Alaska?

One of the greatest pleasures in writing nonfiction books is researching stories that help bring concepts and ideas to life. I love taking brief detours in my writing process to share background information or explain the basis of a fact from history or science. It’s thrilling to discover a piece of knowledge that you’ve never heard of before and share it in a book. Often, those forgotten or unknown stories become the connective tissue in shaping a manuscript, bridging the flow of content together, and helping the important takeaways stick and be memorable. Surely you’ve experienced this yourself in reading an engrossing book filled with unexpected, extra wisdom that’s alluring and that keeps you moving along at a good clip page after page—wisdom that can also make you a hit at your next cocktail party. And now to the answers to the above questions.

I once worked on a book about the importance of vitamin D. Yes, there’s a lost story about vitamin D and the dinosaurs. In gathering materials for the manuscript I came across a compelling argument about how part of the dinosaurs’ demise could have been from a simple deficiency in this critical hormone. We’ve all heard about the asteroid theory of their extinction. A massive asteroid struck Earth and caused a cascade of catastrophic events, including a perpetual winter of debris, ash, and smoke that blocked the sun’s life-giving rays. The food chain collapsed. One of the downstream effects of the blast that’s rarely talked about was the lack of UVB light penetrating down so vertebrates like the dinosaurs could make vitamin D and support bone health. When the dinosaurs that survived the blast became deficient, they grew weaker and failed to procreate.

The answer to the second question is also yes. Two billion years ago, long before the dinosaurs roared Earth, our primordial ancestors engulphed specialized bacteria that generated energy to support life. These ancestors enslaved the bacteria and over the course of evolution the bacteria became our mitochondria, those tiny organelles within cells that generate chemical energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Our mitochondria still resemble their bacterial origin and contain their own genome, but they cannot exist without us now, nor can we survive without them. Any book about human health likely contains a nod to our bacterial partners.  

As for the life-saving dogs, the story of Togo and Balto provides the grand entrance into one of my favorite books about how to help your furry friend live forever. In 1925, during a diphtheria epidemic in Nome, Alaska, these two heroic huskies led a team of sled dogs across the longest and most treacherous leg of the journey spanning 700 miles to deliver an antitoxin serum. It became known as the Great Race of Mercy.

My point in bringing these illuminating stories up is to underscore the importance of engaging storytelling in nonfiction books. I could have gone right to the facts, studies, and prescriptive advice in those books but chose instead to slow the narrative down and offer additional material that enriches the reader’s experience. Don’t be afraid to infuse your writing with brief anecdotes, historical notes, and provocative trivia that ultimately keep the reader captured.

When you do your homework in preparing to write a book, or even just a book proposal, devote time to finding surprising nuggets of wisdom and side stories that accessorize and accompany your main points. This is not hard to do—the internet is full of them if you go looking. Be sure to fact check and cite credible sources. The last thing you want to do is tell a story that’s false, refuted, or debunked. Be transparent about any controversial theory.

Truth be told, an epidemic of rickets from vitamin D deficiency probably was not the main cause of the dinosaurs’ disappearance. Dr. Harry T. Marshall, a pathologist at the University of Virginia, tried to push that theory back in 1928. One hundred years later, we’re still searching for a fossilized dinosaur with a defective tooth or obvious signs of diseased bones.

Credit: Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash