Writing With A Scalpel

I'm doing some serious writing at the moment... and the gears are very, very rusty. I've also discovered that some ideas don't come out without a lot of writing to dislodge them.
Basically, I need my stuff there on paper so I can understand exactly how crap it is, and how it would be better if character y didn't do z.
And then the ideas come.
I can remember being able to dump whole stories out of my brain and onto paper but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
So these days its braindump to notebook (paper, the visceral thing seems to help. Also, unlike my laptop, if it got stolen I'd feel sorry for the recipient). Then scalpel it until the redundancy is excised.

I'm re-watching the House pilot because there are things I can learn from it. If you watch the first scene featuring House himself (along with Wilson), you learn pretty much everything you need to know about the character. You can make a list, and then check it off as you go through that first scene.
Then, just in case you missed that he was *smart*, the Scoobies re-iterate that he is smart in *their* first scene.
That sort of economy looks like genius when you've re-written your opening scenes several times over and the dialogue is *still* stilted.