Every project has a tale–a story behind the story–and when I talk with potential clients, I always ask what brought them to the book they wish to write. The answers are often remarkable: I can only give a handful of examples (though this is a post that could go on and on) but learning the provenance of a given project is part of what I love about my job.

When his grandmother gave him a vintage typewriter that had once belonged to a distant, long-dead cousin, journalist Bill Lascher had no idea that it was a gift that would change his life. As it happened, the cousin had been Mel Jacoby, a dashing young war correspondent for Time Magazine who covered the opening days of WWII in the Pacific Theatre. Along with his new bride–a pioneering female correspondent named Annalee Whitmore—the newlyweds dodged Japanese bombs in the Chinese capital of Chongqing, narrowly escaped the fall of Manila, hunkered down in Corregidor with General MacArthur, and reported on the soldiers fighting desperately in Bataan. As Bill researched the history of this long-lost cousin, he became convinced that he had to write the story Mel Jacoby did not live to complete. A DANGER SHARED will be published by William Morrow in 2016.

In a similar vein, another of my clients, writer and scholar Diane Simmons, inherited a trove of yellowed, perfumed letters from a close family friend. When–a bit reluctantly–she dug into them, she found a story that beggared belief, an epistolary chronicle of a charming serial bigamist and his nine wives. She used that remarkable tale as the centerpiece of an examination of the changing roles of women before and after WWII. THE COURTSHIP OF EVA ELDRIDGE is narrative history and a detective story rolled into one.

When first I talked with her, psychologist and corporate coach Michelle Brody described the illustrated relationship book she wanted to write; she’d developed an effective technique in her practice in which she literally drew a picture of each of the dozen fights that all couples have. (Turns out Tolstoy was wrong, that even unhappy families are pretty similar). Her concept struck me as brilliant–12 stick figure fights!– but tricky to execute. Michelle was not an artist herself, nor had she created a proposal, but she did have a vision for the book. After expressing my enthusiasm for STOP THE FIGHT, as well as options for how we might proceed, Michelle vanished. But when she returned, more than a year later, it was with a complete manuscript. She’d hired an artist and created precisely the book she envisioned, and that’s the book I sold. Take a look at her smart, funny, spot-on website www.Stopthefightbook.com.  I challenge you NOT to recognize yourself in one of these fights.

I’ll close with the story behind the story of one of my memoirist clients, Qais Akbar Omar, author of A Fort of Nine Towers, who started recording his recollections of growing up in war-torn Afghanistan as a way of shaking off the nightmares that plagued him. Although English was not his mother tongue (far from it; he’d taught himself English from appliance manuals in the wake of the American invasion) he found that writing in English offered him a degree of distance from the traumatic events he recounted. For weeks, he locked himself in his room in Kabul and wrote. When he emerged, he handed off the hundreds of pages he’d produced to a friend, Steve Landrigan, an American aid worker and former journalist. Landrigan quickly realized that the book Qais produced was something far more polished and profound than the typical writing-as-therapy. The men found their way to me because I’d worked with Naguib Mahfouz, one of Qais’s all-time-favorite authors. They sent me the full manuscript and I was thunderstruck.The book has now been published to great critical acclaim, in more than a dozen languages around the world.

I’d love to hear your stories behind your stories—what brought YOU to the tale you wish to tell?