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I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

When I'm putting a story together, I generally know the ending and a couple of the points halfway through, and I've got sort of an idea about the beginning, and although I do write the story one sentence at a time, when I'm thinking it up, I'm thinking it up all at once.

When I begin to write a story, I usually know how things will end. It's the journey toward that point I must discover. The process is sometimes painful, but also exciting.

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

I always think that you finish one movie, you start a new one, and you think, 'OK. I did that last one. Now I've learned. I know how this works.' Then by the end of the movie, you think, 'No, I don't, really.'

In time I began to understand that it's when you start writing that you really find out what you don't know and need to know.

I sometimes don't know what I'm writing when I start writing it, on some level.

The way I write is very much without kind of a goal. I have something I'm interested in and then I decide I'm going to explore it. I don't know where the characters are going to go, I don't know what the movie is going to do or what the screenplay is going to do. For me, that's the way to keep it alive.

I don't pare down much. I write the beginning of a story in a notebook and it comes out very close to what it will be in the end. There is not much deliberateness about it.