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As a writer, I challenge myself not to tell the same story - to tackle different characters with different issues.

My stories are character driven.

Writing a story is pretty all-consuming for me - it feels a lot like method acting, and for the eight or twelve or fifteen months that I'm working on a story, I'm constantly thinking about how my narrator would react to whatever tangled situation I'm in.

Although my stories are all very different on the surface, I like to write stories about characters struggling with big problems. I'm always reminded, no matter how different from me one of my characters is from me on the surface, how we're all pretty much the same underneath.

I think my sensibilities about storytelling and character just automatically come into play when I'm trying to work on any kind of narrative. For me, it doesn't really matter what the source of the narrative is. I will be looking for ways to make it into an intriguing story with empathetic characters.

I don't really approach stories to make them different from other stuff I've seen, I just try to get into the character, into his or her head. Try to make it as funny, as scary or as wild as I can so that I really like it.

I usually start with an ending, then outline high points of things that happen, and kind of make up the rest as I go along. Occasionally, the characters surprise me, and I wonder how we got here. Other times, the characters are stubborn and won't do something I want them to in the story.

As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.

I love stories. I just enjoy telling stories and watching what these characters do - although writing continues to be just as hard as it always was.

In real life, people are constantly saying one thing and doing another, but if you write your characters that way, the story becomes too hard to follow.