I decided to take a short break from writing quiz books to write something else. What do you get if you take the questions out of a quiz? Well, the answers obviously, but more than that you get those pure unadulterated nuggets of trivia, which I think is actually quite a good analogy for the process of unearthing fascinating facts. You spend your time reading, listening, watching, investigating, all trying to dig up that gem of a fact, and when you do its like you’re one of the San Francisco 49ers finding a shiny chunk of gold at the bottom of your pan. That’s what I did in the process of writing ‘A Curious Book of Fascinating Facts’ and had a great time doing it too!
What makes a fascinating fact though? Well crucially, it can’t just be a statistic, there has to be a story behind it because more often than not a fact without a story is often a little boring, prompting the ‘so what?’ or ‘Huh?’ reaction. Instead what we want is the ‘Wow, really? I didn’t know that!’ response.
As an example, do you know who was the first man to successfully swim across the English Channel? It was Captain Matthew Webb in 1875 but do you know the story behind it or what happened after? Even if you did know about Captain Webb (it is a classic quiz question after all), you probably haven’t heard about his rival who beat him to it, but whose attempt didn’t count because he ‘swam’ it in an inflatable rubber suit. That larger than life gentleman has a story even more interesting than Webb’s, and you can read about it in this book.
Other things you can learn include about the mysterious extra bone you may have in your body, the weight of the soul and even the beginnings of the popularity of vegan food – in the medieval era!
I’m not done with writing about facts, it was so much fun I’ll probably write another fact book, and in the meantime keep an eye on the Quizicle blog, because I’m planning to post a few fascinating facts on here from time to time as well.
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