A few posts ago I wrote about the research and writing tasks that any historian or biographer faces. But yesterday, while watching The Best Years of Our Lives (which, for my money, is the greatest movie ever made), I remembered that its director William Wyler was one of the five filmmakers profiled in the book and miniseries Five Came Back. And that led me down a web search that helped me find this great interview with Mark Harris, who wrote the book. In the interview Harris talks about the process he went through, how you gather every scrap of material you can get because you never really know just what will end up providing a key insight, and the little discoveries a researcher makes that can throw unexpected light on the process. Give it a read, because it gives such great insight into what a historian and author must do, and it hits on so many points familiar to my present task.