Looks like he's asking his car (-: That's a very Gene thing to do...

I generally work my way through the situation logically when I first start to write, then once I'm in a comfortable spot, I hit the fic. I wrote one story called "The New Year and its Resolution" where I did a sort of background history to Gene, to explain to myself who he was and how to got to be where he was in the story. It worked well for me.