Here's what I didn't put in the book. In the 1960s, my mother refused to accept that my brother, who had a rare early childhood illness that left him unable to speak and showed traits we'd now recognize on the autism spectrum, had no path to public education.

You can have every strong idea your book needs and still lose the reader. Strong material in a weak order never builds. The reader feels the drift even when they cannot name it. They notice they have stopped turning pages.

I wrote a book about pioneers who fix broken systems. Then I started reading other people's books that are still a "work in progress," and watched author after author break their own books in similar ways.