[	How do I... feel?	|	discontent	]
[	What's that noiz?	|	Fountains of Wayne	]

1. Base the characters on people you know; and you can combine a couple of people you know into one character. This way they're likely to speak and react in idiosyncratic & consistent ways. Probably in the course of the story they'll develop away from these origins, but even if they don't, they won't be just Joe and Peggy Paperhead.

(Related -- think about making an admirable person function as a bad guy, and a fairly contemptible guy do the difficult right thing in a pinch.)

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It's true that I outline the daylights out of a story before I start writing it. I guess there are a couple of stages -- this may be more than you wanted to know! -

First I make a separate Word file for each of the topics the story is likely to involve. In the last book I had files called, for instance, Philby, Moscow, Kuwait, Arabs, SovInt (for Soviet Intelligence services), and so on. In these I copy out all the relevant or interesting bits from my reading -- bits like "Bedouin beliefs in demons, jones 123, smith 456, brown 789," those being authors of research books and page numbers, so I can quickly find the sections I've underlined in my research books. Sometimes if it's very good I copy whole passages from the research books into these files. And in each file I keep topics together in little chapters (Bedouin clothing, for example) and head these topic sections with "main [whatever]" -- like, for the section on Bedouin clothing I'll put at the top a bunch of phrases that I might go searching for: "main Bedouin clothing, main Bedouin dress, main Bedouin garb." That way I'm sure to find the section when I want it, even if I can't remember exactly what "title" I gave the "chapter."
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How do I... feel?

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impressed

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Every one of [my novels] has involved times when -- in spite of all my obsessive outlining -- I come to a point where I'm sure I've written myself into a corner, and there's no way the plot can proceed; but then I just open a scratch file and talk to myself ("What can he do here, Powers?" I dunno. "Well, tell me three things." They'll be three dumb things. "Fine, give me three dumb things," etc.) and eventually I circle in on the problem until I find some solution, though it might be after a whole lot of pages of talking to myself.

You should have seen the question-and-answer session that led me to conclude that Scott Crane should disguise himself as a woman, for the last poker games in _Last Call._ That took a while, and I was very hard to convince.

In fact, I think that's a valuable principle! When you're considering ideas for a story and how to handle plot developments and all that, don't do it in your head! Do your thinking into the keyboard (or, in the pre-computer days, onto paper). If you do it in your head, you eventually come to a conclusion, which is likely to be unworkable, and you won't remember all the fleeting little questions and half-thoughts that led you there; but if you've done all your thinking into the keyboard -- and I find myself even writing bits like, "um, um, um, let me think a minute" -- you can scroll back up through all the random thoughts and free associations that led you to the conclusion, and often find a valuable bit that you didn't pursue.

Talking to yourself, asking yourself questions -- into the keyboard -- can often lead to better solutions than you could have come up with "alone"! I remember Phil Dick said that in times of crisis he would type out a dialogue between himself and a character from one of his books -- say Leo Runciter from Ubik -- who was smarter than Phil was, and at the end of the dialogue he would have come up with way better advice than he would ever have been able to think up on his own.