How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

One of the things I always need to do after I've got a first draft is raise the stakes for my characters. I think it's because my stories almost always start from characters instead of events. I will get an idea for a scene and my first thought is always "what is the character doing here?" I spend a lot of time thinking about the character, until I understand what type of person the character is and what she (or he) would do next, and then I'm off to the races. But what ends up happening in the resulting first draft, then, is that I have a lot of scenes where I'm just working things out about the characters, and not much is actually happening. In the earlier editions of The Book, for example, there were a bunch of scenes where my character was sitting on the porch thinking. And those scenes were necessary to my own understanding of the main character, they were...they were boring . Nothing happened in those scenes. Combine that with a plot that had ver