Your lighthouse

     There is a wonderful passage in Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" that offers great advice to writers.
      Here is the passage: "One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. `Which road do I take?' she asked. The response was a question: `Where do you want to go?'
`I don't know,' Alice answered. `Then,' said the cat, `it doesn't matter.'"
     As writers, if we know where we are going with our work, we'll never be puzzled by the fork in the road. We need to stay focused. Billy Wilder, the late, great screen writer, put it this way: "If you are having trouble writing the third act, the problem is probably in the first act."
      The best way to handle the ending to a story is to know what it is before you begin. The ending is the lighthouse in the sea as you go to your keyboard and begin your voyage.