I always work backwards. Everything the characters do, how they react, where they go, what happens to them - is all focused and channeled to how they end up. I know the characters' destination in the narrative sense before I even start to write. The last words I write of a book are very often the first, so it doesn't much matter how you start. I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Writers always go back to their young days, to their young lives.
The point of a notebook is to jumpstart the mind. It's not necessary to go bathe one's feet in the Ganges and travel around the world and work on a steamer to be a poet . . .