For me, at least, writing consists very largely of exploring intuition. A character is really the sense of a character, embodied, attired, and given voice as he or she seems to require. Where does this creature come from? From watching, I suppose. From reading emotional significance in gestures and inflections, as we all do all the time. These moments of intuitive recognition float free from their particular occasions and recombine themselves into nonexistent people the writer and, if all goes well, the reader feel they know.
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Ross Gale is a writer and editor from the Pacific Northwest. 
“reading emotional significance in gestures and inflections”: easy to say and hard to do, right? How does one (read: how do I) silence the inner chatter and slow down the inner eye enough to pay attention to those gestures and inflections? In this case, writing a paragraph requires disciplining the mind to notice and filter the world outside of itself, and communicating the truth of those details in ways that resonate. Does that make sense? (Even this is hard!)
She goes on to say that writing comes out of our emotional memory which, I think, is also exploring the experience within oneself, as opposed to just detailing what’s outside of oneself.