@ablerism Yeah, love your point about the exciting stuff being what the author discovered in writing. That “I’m onto something, though I’m not exactly sure what” feeling.
I feel like I sometimes live with a false double standard between non-fic and poetry/creative writing. For the latter, my wife (whose craft is creative non-fiction) always says, “No epiphany in the author. No epiphany in the reader.” It’s like the problem when you set out to write the poem “about” something and have foregone the opportunity for mystery or surprise. I love that Annie Dillard line (from Thorton Wilder from an anon source), “One line of a sonnet falls from the ceiling, and you tap in the others around it with a jeweler’s hammer.” But then with the academic stuff I read I start thinking that those epiphanies had better be conference-paper tested a million times before it’s put in print. Bad bad not good.