I used to write chronologically when I started, from beginning to end. Eventually I went, 'That's absurd; my heart is in this one scene, therefore I must follow it.'
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I tend to write my beginnings and endings first - as a cartoonist and storyteller, I couldn't sit down every day if I didn't know where the story was headed.
If you're gonna start a story, you start from the beginning, right?
It was such a paradox for me that the only thing I know how to do is act, but that the first thing I abandoned while writing were the characters.
That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.
After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction.
I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.
Although when I start a novel I know how it will begin and end, I like to let the people within the story take me on a journey between those points without having a fixed plan.
And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
I'm one of those people who think that stories should have a beginning, a middle and an end, and then they're over, and then you tell the next story.
I've always known when I start a story what the last line is. It's always been the case, since the first story I ever wrote. I don't know how it's going to get there, but I seem to need the destination. I need to know where I end up. It never changes, ever.