Whether you’re being interviewed about your published work, addressing a book club, or discussing your new manuscript with a literary agent or a publisher, you’ll need to answer the question about what inspired your book.

“What’s the story behind your story?”—along with “What’s your writing process?”—is the question most often asked by those who want to know more about you and your work.

Your thoughtful explanation can open the door to more questions and a deeper interest in you as a writer (and maybe even more sales). A rambling, impersonal, or dismissive reply, however, will send your listeners away disappointed and no longer willing to invest their energy in you.

People seek connections with other people. Because creatives do something quite rare—make art instead of merely consume it—don’t underestimate the fascination factor. Your audience of one or dozens really does want to know the story behind your story as a means of understanding more about you.

Take some time considering the origins of your book ideas. Memoirists and other nonfiction writers draw most obviously on real-life experiences to produce their work, but novelists do, too. If you write fiction, ponder the inciting incident (“inciting inspiration”) that started you thinking about a character or situation until you had that epiphany all writers long for: “This could be a book!”

Taking my work as examples, the inciting inspiration has always been one of two things: listening to or reading about others’ harrowing/fascinating personal experiences (Hardscrabble Road, The Five Destinies of Carlos Moreno, and The Caretaker) or seeing/reading something compelling and then engaging in “what if” scenarios (Aftermath and Watch What You Say).

Watch What You Say will be published by SFK Press on November 5th, so I’m now drafting my talking points for interviewers and book clubs. In this suspense thriller, a web-radio interviewer with a form of synesthesia that allows her to see people’s emotions and intent in what they say must rescue her kidnapped husband.

Synesthesia (the blending of senses) affects 5%-15% of the global population according to the National Institutes of Health, but I am not among their number. Nor have I ever been on either side of a kidnapping or had to rescue someone. So, what inspired this book?

Here’s my story: I’ve always had an interest in our amazing minds, having grown up with a mother and grandmother who foresaw future events on a regular basis. I’ve even experienced brief flashes of this myself (and I’ll relate some of these experiences if the audience is interested). Reading about ESP led me to a range of psychological subjects. I became a fan of Dr. Oliver Sacks of Awakenings fame. Among many other mental phenomena, he wrote and spoke about the synesthesia.

One of the most fascinating things about this blending of senses is that every synesthete experiences it differently from everybody else with the same gift. For example, as a little boy, Vladimir Nabokov complained to his mother that his alphabet blocks were all painted the wrong colors. “A” was actually red, not blue, and so on. Experiencing the phenomenon herself, his mother understood—and her perception of the “right” color of each block differed from her son’s as well as what was painted there.

The most common form is this “grapheme-color” synesthesia, where the individual sees a distinct hue for every number and often each letter. After months of reading about Nabokov and many others, I embarked on a story outline with a heroine who had grapheme-color synesthesia, and I began writing a first draft. I didn’t get far. The trouble with the story was that this form of the phenomenon didn’t affect her interactions with anybody else and didn’t result in any tension or help resolve the plot.

Back to my research and brainstorming. Another common form of synesthesia is chromesthesia, where colors and shapes are seen in the mind’s eye when the individual hears sounds. For many, this occurs when music is playing (a plethora of musicians have experienced this, from Duke Ellington and Billy Joel to Tori Amos and Lady Gaga). Others only see colorful shapes accompanying loud noises. There are some individuals who “hear with their eyes” in the presence of every sound, from voices to ceiling fans.

The “what if” scenarios began again: What if my protagonist not only saw colors and shapes all the time but she could also interpret them? When people spoke, she could read their emotions and intent and literally watch what they said. And what if her job was as an interviewer, where her ability could be put to exceptional use as the ultimate BS meter? Also, such a gift could make her vulnerable if she relied on it too much. Add in the Internet radio as a cool, up-and-coming form of media, the twist where the wife must rescue the kidnapped husband instead of the usual other way around, and a dark, personal connection with the kidnapper, and Watch What You Say was born.

This is the long version to the question, of course, and I still need to finetune the details of this “story behind the story.” Still, it has all the elements of an engaging response: personal hooks (i.e., stories about me and my family), trial and error and setbacks, and eventual success due to perseverance and inspiration.

If you include these elements in your reply to such inquiries, I promise your listener will want to hear more.