3,000 new words and counting...

I've tried stitching short stories together to make a novel. I've tried starting from the beginning and keeping going til I reach the end. I've tried writing character sketches and listing the high points of the plot. This time I'm trying a mixture of them all. The one thing all my attempts at novels have in common is I can't write anything more than the first few chapters till I've spent time chatting with the characters. The trouble is, my characters seem to share my memory traits, fixating...