On Writing and Storytelling: When Fiction Finds Its Muse After the Fact

I didn’t set out to write Leigh E. into Comings and Goings. In fact, I didn’t realize I had until yesterday.

Kelly Moore, as she appears in the novella, was always her own person—smart, witty, emotionally fluent, and possessed of that quiet confidence that doesn’t demand space; it simply fits. But as I reread a particular scene, something shifted. A flicker of recognition. A sense that Kelly’s emotional cadence, her physical presence, even the lilt in her voice… they weren’t imagined. They were remembered.

Leigh and I have been friends for over twenty years. She’s Southern, adventurous, sharp as a whip, and gorgeous in that unassuming way that makes you feel lucky just to be in her orbit. I sent her a message, almost sheepishly, with an excerpt from the book. She read it and replied, “LOL, yep, that’s me!” And just like that, fiction folded back into life.

A few minutes later, she sent me a screenshot: the epigraph from Comings and Goings, that line from Summer of ’42 —“Life is a series of comings and goings.” She’d bought the Kindle edition. Not out of obligation, but because something in those words felt familiar. Felt true.

There’s a quiet kind of magic in moments like this. When a character you thought you invented turns out to be someone you’ve known all along. When a friend sees herself in your work and embraces it with joy. When the emotional architecture of your fiction finds its muse—not in memory, but in real time.

Kelly Moore will always be her own character. But now, she carries a little more of Leigh’s light. And that makes the story feel even more like home.