How do you write a novel?

I wonder if great writers have a particular process for writing.

Shakespeare was a working director, maybe actor, and certainly businessman. He was busy. His Folio suggests that he changed his plays as he worked, marking words out, putting new ones in, and probably got a lot of input from his troupe.

Hemingway wrote in the buff and standing up so that he couldn't--or at least wouldn't--wander off in the middle of the six pages he insisted on writing a day. Kaye Gibbons mentioned renting a hotel room so that she could stay up all night scribbling away, catching every moment she could find between children and chores.

Annie Dillard says you can't write a real novel in less than 5-10 years. She should know. Lee Smith starts with a 50-page outline and told Dillard she should do the same, so she does. One author, who used to be a physicist, says to use the snowflake method, which is based on fractals.  

I've wondered how to begin and then where to go once I've begun, good questions since I'm beginning Volume 2 of Her Life as She Knew It. I tend to write the last paragraph first, and I always change my setting because I find out that the place I started with was nothing like my idea of it. Or, as with Vol. 2, I can't account for one of my favorite characters and have grown too attached to toss him, so I moved the whole story (to Georgia,in this case).

I begin with end in mind and know what the last page will say when I don't know anything else. Then I begin to write about characters, knowing I'll have to throw out pages and pages that served only to help me find a particular character. That's where I am now--working on that last page and developing characters who will live and breathe in the reader's mind. I know the idea of the novel--it's in my head, both this novel and the  next two--and so just have to get it down in a way that helps the reader see what I see.

 Is that a process? I'm not sure.