Some days I don’t know where my story is going. I know where it starts, what happens and how it ends (usually), but getting there can be murky.

While fretting over the ending of one novel, a journalist friend who is a published author told me to sleep on it. Duh, I thought!

That’s how I get into this trouble in the first place! My dreams, or my mind rather. As I lay at night to settle my body and brain, my gray matter wanders into other realms and creates characters and situations and…viola`, a story is born.

So it only makes sense that I take a nap, or go to bed to see a path in the jumbled pile of words on the page and find my way onto the next scene and eventually to the finale.

That did happen a couple weeks ago. I had to write a scene, backstory really, and from that scene I created, came the clarity of the ending. A more dramatic ending than I had planned. The realization of this is still very profound for me because I did not expect that.

I had to write a scene because the ZBWG asked the question, “why does he hate the lake”? Well I didn’t know. I just was a convenient way of keeping a character away from a place. But after they asked that question, I knew I needed an answer. As soon as I was walking to the car an hour later, the back story was coming to me. After a brief nap, I was writing. It crystalized the animosity between two characters and firmed up someone’s family tree.

My brother is a published author of ebooks in the erotica genre and accuses me of wasting my time with critique groups. He reminds me that if I want to be published, I should see him. But I’m a traditionalist when it comes to publishing, and that’s how I’d like to try to make it.

But more importantly, groups like WIP and ZBWG keep my grounded and make me answer (and ask) the questions that propel the story.