ref. your first posting. How the heck do you write an ending first? Is this unsual or does my mind only work from beginning to end? I'm not a normal type thinker but writing the ending first, puts me upside down. Unless you just love teasing apart puzzles? 
I literally write the ending first. Sit down and knock out so many words of epic or intimate confrontation between people having no idea how they got there or WHY they are doing what they are doing. It's generally a full scene.
I make up characters in my head all the time. I'll see a pretty girl or a shady looking guy while shopping and the old brain will start spinning webs about them. They aquire names. Pasts. Odd habits. Some fade away. Some start scheming. Eventually, they make their fate known to me. It makes sense to me. You don't start on a journey without a destination in mind. Once the destination is chosen, the process becomes one of investing that fate with all the power my imagination can muster.
For example:
For the past two years I have been slowly writing an epic fantasy novella called
The Woman Who Hitchiked With Cats. The genesis of the story was myself waking up from a sound sleep with the final scene in my head. A very old woman in fur and leather in a bizarre saloon says: "My name is Charity. And, here on the Borderland, Charity is a stone cold
bitch." She rises up, kicks over the table, pulls a massive gun and begins executing every sumbitch in the place.
I also knew the following, on some deep and secret level:
She wore the skull of a cat as a talisman, and the skull had eyesockets as black as space.
Her name was not Charity. That was an alias. And, in her journey to this grubby saloon on the edge of reality, she'd also worn the names Faith and Hope.
I just have to get her there. And there lies the pain, the agony, and the utter primal joy of writing for me.
