I've got a question about your writing process: How do you approach individual scenes? Do you know where it is going to end up before you put pen to paper? Do you use the Mamet formula of Character wants X, makes efforts to get X and is thwarted? Or do you

I rarely ever think about discreet scenes as separate from a whole unless I’m doing some kind of scripting. Comic book scripts, teleplays, and screenplays allow for that kind of compartmentalization, but I can’t remember ever looking at a single scene in a novel and conceiving it as anything other than the next bit of the story. That said, I’ll try to give you an answer that isn’t deliberately coy.

Sometimes, yes, I have a good idea of what’s going to happen next. That next may be a single lin...