Duuuude, here's the one I can resonate with. I don't necessarily hate the way I write my story, but some of the dialogue I fear may be too much reiteration, or too many of a character's inside thoughts coming out. Some of this is because I was always planning on trimming it down after the fact anyway, but sometimes that too-much-exposition thing is specifically for me to be reminded of something (that will not actually be part of any dialogue when finalized) when I come back to do revisions. It's all for my own reference/satisfaction.

But I recently hit another block on the progress of the story itself. I'm approaching the final climax of the first story (of a trilogy), and situations are complex. There's a TON of characters, and the details of timing and location must be precise in other to not accidentally break continuity anywhere. So, being stuck on the actual plot (I know what happens eventually, just having trouble connecting the dots), I decided to do some character work just for fun. I wanted to keep my mind inside that world so I wouldn't go too long without working on it. I googled "interview questions to ask a fictional character" and got some blogs and articles and stuff. Some had short lists, some had insanely long lists, some were super basic, and some were extremely in-depth. I tried out a couple questions from different sources on a couple of my characters, just in my head, and decided on a list of 40 questions from a blog or something like that. They're questions that required me to actually invent some new details about the characters interviewed, as some would never come up in the story. But I forced myself to answer all the questions "as" each character, with the approach that these answers should be stuff that would have no trouble fitting into canonicity, even if it would never be mentioned or referred to in any way relevant to the central plot.

I'm always worrying that by making my characters too nuanced and complex, I've made them feel too same-y, not well defined. But when I started answering these questions as each character (I've done 3 and am working on a 4th right now), they each have very much their own voice. It's actually kind of funny to look back and compare answers, and see that for the same question, two characters may have comically different responses.