When I first started writing, I wrote fan fiction. It was almost always fan fiction about my favorite LEGO toys going on adventures together. Eventually, when I realized that I wanted more than anything to create my own, original work, the big, crazy adventures remained, but I started to put my own characters into them. The first original stories I wrote were about kids my age getting sucked into world-threatening plots where they had to save the world.

Books and comics: Neil Gaiman, Matt Fraction, Thomas Harris, Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft; Film and TV: Bryan Fuller, J. J. Abrams, Edgar Wright, Sam Esmail, Joss Whedon, Johnathan Nolan, Nic Pizzolato.

Just about anything can inspire me--a movie or TV show, a good book, a piece of music, a conversation with a friend; when it comes to the actual writing, it often bounces between sitting down and plotting out the story, and just jumping straight into writing it. Oftentimes I'll be writing something I've plotted out and realize I want the story to go in a different direction than I'd originally planned, or, I'll be plotting something out and decide to go back and change something I've already written.

Writing things that move me. I know something is good when I'm fully engrossed in the creating of it, and when writing certain scenes makes me emotional. If I'm writing a scene that makes me react that strongly, even when it's because the scene or the story is derived from something I've gone through in my own life, I feel it's that much more likely to make someone else react strongly, too. If my writing makes people emotional, if it moves them, touches them in some way, then I've succeeded as a writer. There's no feeling like it when that happens.