Last August at a seminar on Whidbey Island, Timothy Egan, Pulitzer Prize winner and National Book Award winner (for The Worst Hard Time about the Dust Bowl) gave a terrific talk on non-fiction writing. One of his points was to try to include a “killer fact” in our article writing–as in, readers learn plenty of facts in non-fiction writing, but a “killer fact” blows our minds.
When I visited the Rhineland-Palatinate, during an evening with the Museum Society in Bad Duerkheim, I heard a killer fact: From 1618-1818, the people of the Rhineland-Palatinate endured 20 wars. That’s right, 200 years of Catholics v. Protestants, dukes vs. kings, Louis XIV of France ransacking and burning through the Palatinate in 1689, Napoleon laying siege beginning in 1803 (Napoleon even set a new calendar, starting at the year 1).
Another killer fact: Indonesian volcanic eruptions in the 1815 and 1883 heavily influenced European climate. More volcanoes have erupted in 2010, rekindling interest in the climatology of the nineteenth century. Hmm. Volcanic history repeating itself?