I think. I pace. I smoke. I talk to myself. I see things. I pace and smoke some more. This is basically the manner in which I process thoughts and ideas into words.

Other than that, I don't have any set pattern that launches me into a particular script, stage play or story. In film and television, quite often I am approached by a producer or a director who wants to develop a certain story or theme. If that's the case, I gather as much information around the subject matter until I get a sense of characters, place and general tone of the piece. Once I do that, I let the main characters drive the plot within what I conceive as a suitable structure for that story. When it's an idea I develop myself, I am usually interested in a certain theme or a milieu, such as the gambling world, horseracing, love and lust in the twentyfirst century or whatever is obsessing me at the time. In a sense, when I approach an idea through a specific world - that world is the main character, the driving force, and the other plots and characters support the world I'm presenting.

Stage, on the other hand, for me, is a completely different experience. There is a sense of poetic freedom and heightened realism one can employ more readily with stage that appeals to my sensibilities. Perhaps because stage is where I started, first as an actor then, soon after, as a writer, it always feels like a homecoming of sorts. With stage plays, I like to start with an image or an idea - again, it would be something I'm obsessing about at that current time. If it's an image that has caught my attention, I place that image in space and time. Then ask myself, who's occupying this scene? What is she, he or they doing there? What's their story? I like to roll over possibilities until themes and characters begin to evolve; quite often, this occurs simultaneously.

I am much less prone to outline a stage play as I would a screenplay. I like to see the story unfold as I go along. Perhaps just thinking of two or three scenes in advance. I like to be surprised. I discover things I've placed in the play that at first had no particular meaning end up being an integral aspect of the play. Once I am in the middle of a project I find that life occurring around me resonates and/or echoes the play I am working on. This can be a somewhat surreal and, at the same time, exhilarating experience. This is not to be mistaken as life imitating art or art imitating life, but rather an opening of the mind to certain ideas and experiences that, in effect, were there all along and now your eyes have been opened to witness new layers of human interaction and possibilities.

Overall, I don't feel a need to actually "write" every day. I don't impose page counts. I don't have journals. To me, thinking about and experiencing life is writing and the actual act of writing things down is the final process of my thoughts and experiences. Perhaps it is because I found writing - or it found me - later in life, but, even before I started writing, I was always obsessing about ideas and life and why, why, why - and maybe if this happened that would follow this and so on and so on ... and that is basically the process I employ to this day.