I approach it with this idea...

Think of a garden.  Now think of a British formal garden with structured topiaries and mazes, vs. a freeform, wild-ish hippie garden where an overhanging mulberry tree is turning the bottoms of your feet purple, and HOLY SHIT THERE'S A WASP but if you avoid the wasp, hey, look at this hybrid heirloom tomato!

A story is like a garden.  Or one of those bonsai trees.  With no structure at all, it turns into a morass of thorns and greenery.  With a lot of structure, you get a formal garden without a leaf out of place--British-style, or Japanese style, or something like that.  Sometimes so structured its soul dies.  Most of us will be in between...nipping a bud here, letting another one grow a bit more before we decide it's good or bad.  Putting a path here, but then realizing a natural footpath is the better place for it, so you go back and pave it so it reinforces its beauty and usefulness.

Writing a story is like working in a garden.  Some stuff you let grow, others you prop up with a trellis or support or brick path.  When you see a bunch of seedlings, sometimes you pull a few right away, knowing they're weeds.  Other times you take a chance and end up with an unexpected but awesome flower.  And other times you end up with a stink weed you need to kill with a weed whacker and fire before replacing it all with a raised flower bed and a few pre-fab benches.

Give yourself the permission to write the stink bomb and then come back and fix it up later.

Or, you know, just bury it in the backyard and never look at it or smell it again.

Side note...I've also noticed I produce more interesting worlds/universes as I'm older and more experienced with million words of crap, and I'm less likely to go back to old ones that have "structural problems".

I tend to come up with ideas to music.  But for the actual translation from ideas to fingers, I can't have music on.  It would be, to me, like having a fiction book open next to me as I write...much too likely to push me off-course.

I'm pretty over the dom/sub, alpha/beta thing.  There's not much new that's being brought to the table on that topic, and very few authors truly explore the idea in a rational way (as opposed to shallow kink fulfillment).  I think Jacqueline Carey is the only one who has who I find interesting still.

I'm also tired of "bitchy" as being synonymous with "strong".  I actually follow http://www.artofmanliness.com/ blog, and I'm a woman, because it's really not "the art of manliness" but "the art of being self-sufficient, a good person, and honorable" and I like those traits even as a woman.

Jim Butcher is actually writing more of what I'd consider "strong" female characters than many female urban fantasy writers I read, and that's WITH Harry running about attempting to rescue some of them!

I find myself irritated with overt "mechanisms" of describing a character.  Not the description itself...but the mechanism used.  Which isn't to say they can't be done well...I'm just a cynic about them.  It could be mirrors, photographs, or some alternate POV character giving the main a once-over.  I also find myself irritated when some trait of a character is described in loving detail, and is supposed to make them hot or attractive or something, and I don't find that trait particularly appealing.  In urban fantasy you run into a LOT of stories where a character is attractive due to their body alone, usually for stereotypical reasons, and are never fleshed out very much beyond what they look like, or given an "odd" body type, or whatever.

That said, what is worse is getting halfway through the book as a reader, and discovering your mental image in no way matches with the character.  There's one or two cases where that might be the POINT of the story, but outside of that, I don't like thinking a character has, say, green eyes and curly red hair only to find out they really have straight black hair and brown eyes.

I'm far more forgiving about narration that gets in there, gives a description, then gets on to the next thing.  If that makes sense.  Like, I would prefer the narration points out they have black hair and orange eyes, and moves on, than the author setting up a scene or "mechanism" for the sole purpose of describing a character.

Being able to bounce back and forth with dialogue is a hell of a lot of fun.  But since it sounds like you're "new" to having this happen, I would look for these things when reviewing/editing what you've written:

A) Can the reader distinguish who is talking?  I occasionally see people who put a line of dialogue down, and IN THE SAME PARAGRAPH put the nonverbal (or even verbal!) response of the other character.  That makes the reader pause to figure out who is doing what, and breaks flow.  Or, when you have three or more characters, you can end up failing to give enough clues as to who is talking, particularly if two characters talk similarly.  I will have a lot of times when I edit my own stuff where I tweak the words *around* dialogue, just to clear up who is speaking or doing what.  After I've been away from the work for a while I can spot places where I thought I was clear who was talking when I wrote it, but throw *myself* for a loop on the re-read.

B) Are you keeping the dialogue interesting, without having thesaurus diarrhea?

C) Is the dialogue DOING something?  If you really love your characters, it's easy to fall into a "sitcom" trap where your favorites are just quipping at one another and YOU think it's freaking hilarious, but your story isn't really going anywhere with it. Unless you're writing a sitcom, this sort of thing can be an issue if too much of it goes on.  I typically flow with ensemble quipping, because it gets me writing and it can be really fun, then go back and strip out bits I don't need.

I don't know if this contributes to the conversation, but...

I'm female.  I was raised in an all-female household.  No men.  And I have to consciously fight to have my own stories pass the Bechdel test.  ME.  And MY OWN STORIES.

Why is it so hard to do this?  Why doesn't it come naturally, given my own sex and my environment growing up?

And also, why do I fight at all?  Why do I take the time to consciously try to fight my own brain?  Does passing a test like this even matter?  "Political correctness" seems like a construct of what "they" say, and you know "they" are both jackasses and idiots.  The PC Police seem to be a similar thing as "they", some nebulous, unrealistic panderers somewhere, disconnected from the world.  Damn tree huggers.

Heh.  I will never write stories that will be held up as huge bastions or examples of feminism, or anti-racism, with those messages driving the plots.  I KNOW that, and those are not the stories I want to tell, or have the understanding to tell, and I'm not sure it's what's needed from ME as an author.  But the US seems to busy patting itself on the back for "inventing" feminism or anti-racism and the like, and has largely stopped trying to clean up the rest of the remnants of the "bad 'ol days".

Little words, little stereotypes add up.  They're the things that linger in the fabric of society once the overt -ism is banished, the little diseases that remain and grow while everyone's too busy patting themselves on the back once the big, obvious things like lynchings and "get in the kitchen and make me a sammich" are vanished (or we think they are).  These little things influence the self-image of real people.  I'm a woman, almost 30, and I struggle with my self image of being a woman when my more "feminine" traits manifest against my will.  I hate that I exhibit symptoms of PMS, that I can see changes in my behavior at these times, and that if I admit PMS is making me snappish, it seems to undercut any worth an argument I'm trying to make at the time.  I feel like I should banish myself to a dark room and wait it out because it's just hormones.  I loathe myself at these times.  I don't like being a woman.  But, wait--nobody told me to hate myself.  I can get any job like a man, can't I?  I support myself like a man, don't I?  (And I am!)  Yet I still have little periods of self-loathing, and a sense that I am not worth much.  Where does this unease in my own skin come from?  Why do I have this?  I grew up in the 80s and 90s which were all about telling everyone they were equal with everyone else.  I don't wear makeup, I rarely wear skirts.  I grew up in a family of women, and nobody ever directly told me I couldn't do something because I was a girl.  So what did I notice in the world around me that still conveys that message?

It all comes down to the little things.  Remember as a kid, when you and someone else got in a scuffle at school or something and the other person was wrong but you somehow got the blame too because "it takes two to fight"?  The adult in charge DIDN'T SEE the situation, and wasn't just?  All these little reminders in fiction that women aren't worth much because they don't get much focus outside of sex and romance are kind of like that, over and over.  The author is in a position of power, even if only for a short while.  They're asking you to believe in their world--which says YOU don't have much of a place in it.  Hey, this story only has one woman.  Hey, this story has two women--fighting over a man.  It's like being the kid that's not really seen as a valid person, but for your entire life.  And what's frustrating is that people don't MEAN it that way.  You point out something's sexist or racist in a story and 99% of the time the author will feel pissed.  That they just wrote the story as it came to them and now you want to CENSOR them or change it--they didn't MEAN anything bad by it, so because their intent was pure (just ignorant and uneducated) they shouldn't feel guilty, so they are angry instead.

I, personally, know how that is.  I have a hard time writing non-white people into my stories, on top of getting my stories to pass the Bechdel test.  If your world and story is set up with an all-white cast for a long time, maybe years, it's incredibly hard to go back and change that, because you've come to learn these characters and never once have they seemed non-white to you.  So if you try to change it, it's rough, and it hurts, and you don't think it matters because everyone's equal already, right?   Why don't the other people write "empowering" stories so you don't have to struggle?

Well, in sex at least, I'm one of the "other" people, and it's a struggle for me too.  Because society is incredibly subtle and insidious and even unconscious in the messages it puts out and it's really easy to go with the status quo--even if the thing you're parroting hurts yourself.  It's a thing that every writer contributes to...even when they protest they are not contributing at all, or that political or social agendas are the last things on their minds.  But if you never think about it, then are you really in control of your craft?  If you don't think about what you're writing about?  How can you communicate a story if you don't want to examine what you're saying?

So the reason I fight to not let these internalized decisions seep into my writing, the reason I seemingly bow down to the PC train is because...I have proof these little things add up.  I see how it's affected me.  It's hard as hell to go against my "natural" inclination to write loads of guys I think are hot, screwing each other (but no lesbians allowed because I don't bend that way!), and make them all white, but...I don't want to be a part of the problem.  I'm not the ultimate solution, but at least I can try to not be a part of the problem in a small way.  I don't want little girls now to internalize that a convo between two smart female characters, that's not about a man, can happen in real life and does all the time yet isn't good enough for the larger-than-life events in fiction.  I don't want two kids who are not white read a book and end up in a discussion trying to figure out how to insert both of them into a story that only has one token non-white person.  Given all the work that goes into writing a story, how can I possibly say it's too hard to ask myself to grow enough as a person that I can honestly write stories with many women and many races and many sexual orientations without feeling like I'm somehow betraying my artistic legacy, or censoring myself?  Sorry, writing a good story is hard.  If you have to learn about things while doing it...well, that's just part of the territory.  Isn't it?  If you want to do your job well?

And small changes in attitude and stories like that, among many authors and writers and many books and TV shows and movies, are what will eventually change society as time goes on.

So yeah.  Yay Bechdel test!

I also worry about having more than a single non-white person in my stories, and I worry about excluding lesbians from my stories.  It's really easy for me to write lots of gay men, probably for the same reason it's easy for a dude to think two lesbians together are hot.  And that sort of is...NOT getting it, when you ignore the other "variations" in favor of the one you think is ok because it's hot.  I wonder if there are tests for this...?

(In other news, by posting this I just primed myself to be hit by a lightning bolt, right?)

The thing that's always been interesting to me is the interplay among consumers and creators.  The ones who sustain a trend, and the ones who kick a trend off.

Consumers will make something new a hit.  They see it, they like it, they tell twenty friends, be it books, fashion, home decorating--whatever.  Everyone buys it.  It takes off like wildfire.  And once that thing becomes a hit, they'll look for more, and buy up anything that gives them a little more of that fix while they wait for the original person to kicked off a trend to make more, which is how fads get going and business people will try to jump on that gravy train.

However, for that "consumption" to happen AT ALL, a creator somewhere has to come up with something first.  Something awesome has to be created, without knowing if it'll be awesome or not.  And you don't know what trick that new book/series/author will have, because, really, it's almost always something that's driven by the author having a keen talent, a keen nose for story potential, and a bit of luck.  It's not predictable, per se.  It's a risk.

If you chase fads as an author, you'll always be playing "me too!", and you'll be competing with all those other people doing "me too" too.  Identifying a big thing once it's become big is EASY.  And you'll also be AT LEAST a year behind the trend, from when you notice a fad and when you write your addition to the fad.  And maybe that's ok--there are authors out there who are making ok livings playing "me too".  You could even argue that the Dresden Files is a "me too!" following Anita Blake, albeit one of the earliest ones.  But I think it's unwise to begin your plan with intending to play "me too" because you don't want to take that risk of starting your own fad or trend because there's a good chance you WON'T start a fad or trend.  Yet if you DON'T take a risk, you'll totally bring what's maybe a 2% chance of hitting it big with something "original" to 0%.  And who wants to play second fiddle forever?

I think there's a lot of value in just writing what you want to write, and damn the fads.  Now, if what you want to write IS currently a fad...write your little heart out and make sure it reflects that your heart is in it, and ignore the part of you that may say "it's close but not exactly like XYZ, why not tweak it to be XYZ?"  Because chances are, your little weirdnesses and oddities are what would make it stand out among the other "me, toos!" happening.

My two cents, as an unpublished wannabe author who has been studying the market like WHOA for forever.