Bit of a lengthy essay, but I couldn't see a good place to chop it in half. Hopefully it can help!
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On an episode of FangsandFonts, one of the hosts mentioned having trouble writing slice of life. I've been told I write good slice of life. So I thought maybe I should toss out some of my own perspective on the matter, in case anyone out there is having trouble.

You might be saying, "But I don't write slice of life!" Actually, this can help you even if you write other genres. Because Slice of Life (SOL) deals with people. Most genres also deal with people. This might help with the parts in between the aliens or cowboys or sexy vampire sexings.

I think writing SOL comes down to three major points.

Understand Emotion

This is important regardless of genre. Understanding the ways people can react, and what they're thinking and feeling while in bed at night, will help make those characters feel more real and help you fill out your characters more. Sure, sometimes you don't want your action hero to break down with self-doubt and mourning, as that doesn't fit the genre - but you need to find ways to express the slighter version of that, otherwise he comes off robotic. It requires you to research how people react to the situations that you may be putting your characters in - and you can find this out by listening and reading about people in less-extreme-but-similar situations.

Try and explore your own emotions. This doesn't require deep spiritual intunement or a psychiatrist, but you will need to actually try to both feel what it is you feel, and find a way to describe it, because describing and expressing it for your characters on the page is what writing's all about. Once you do that, try and find different ways these emotions might be expressed, because people will feel and respond differently to the same situation. An easy one: loss. How do people feel when they lose something important? How are the ways this is expressed? How do they cope? Once you explore these, then it builds your repertoire for your characters, and from there, the rest of your writing.

Realish Problems

Once you have a good handle on emotion, then you can start applying it when you put characters in collision with their life. Sol is all about character interaction and the conflicts that arise from it, along with larger real life situations like society or poverty, and internal struggles that we as people face.

A FangsandFonts host remarked that one problem they have is making the issues too real; that after a certain point it gets too raw and harsh and no one wants to read that. This is a true point - some things are too hard and real for some people, and the story can turn dark, with little end in sight. Part of the answer is that some topics are too dark to delve deep into, or to be done so only with care and precaution.

Fiction is simpler than real life - characters are consistent and less confusing than real people, conflicts almost always have some solution, and situations are generally escapable. In real life people can make no sense, and some people can be in a no-win conflict and a living situation the person cannot escape. For most people these things are not enjoyable to read - we expect our protagonists to not be passive, we expect them to do things to lead to a resolution. That doesn't make the issues a story covers any less real for the reader, and no less similar to real life, but the goal here is to capture the feel of actual issues and events without actually being them. I think a good middle-ground is to try and be true to that story, to make it enough to resonate with someone who may have felt such a thing. You want the situation to be believable, to seem like it could actually happen to someone, while keeping the details narratively tight. Keep the idea in sight, and make sure that they go towards the situation.

Here's some examples, some of which I've either written or are working on:

A man is rendered impotent after overcoming prostate cancer. How can he find a way to fulfill the needs of a woman to the point that makes him feel secure that he's still a man?

A cocky star high school athlete, with a full scholarship to college, loses his eyesight. How does he cope with everything he knows about his world being changed, and can he make peace with it?

A divorced man still pines for his ex-wife, who is now in an interspecies marriage. She comes to him and asks him to help her make a baby, because their species is very uncommon in this part of the country. Will this help him get over her, make him worse, or will he be able to get her back?

Can you see these happening to real people (aside from the one that deals with species)? With real people, these would quickly become complicated, dragged out, and may never be resolved. Yet when I concieved these issues, I knew the direction I wanted to go.

Still, sometimes the story gets too real for you. You touch a nerve. That can be bad, but at the same time it can be good. Writing can work as a catharsis, especially if it's personal experience - that's often where you can make it more genuine. (Granted, some personal accounts are stranger than fiction.) If it's starting to hit a nerve for you, judge whether you should pull away or not, because sometimes you want to move your reader, and that may require you to be moved too.

The Little Things

To go in a different direction, there's a third element that's equally important. In most writing when people talk about worldbuilding, they mean creating a believable setting, one that works and has continuity. In SOL, worldbuilding is your characters. This is where you are spending all your time, so they need more flesh than with some other genres.

To do that, you bring up seemingly insignificant quirks about the character, or little events that happen with unique reactions. Is your character inconsistent or hypocritical over precise little inanities? Does your character make the same error every [time this situation arises]? Would they rather go to work sick than see a doctor, to the detriment of their health? Does the cheese on their burger HAVE to go on top or else the burger is upside down? Can they not use a public bathroom if there's anyone else in the bathroom?

Take my mother for example. She cannot sleep on a bed unless she makes it first, because she "feels the wrinkles and they drive her crazy". No one visits her, but she needs furniture for show and to keep the house clean "in case someone were to see it". She often uses words incorrectly and makes up nonsense words when at the loss for one.

Now, normally I am pretty adamant about non-relevant things appearing in writing, but these little bits are both establishing the character as a person, and reinforcing the setting (SOL); if these things should appear, they should appear in Slice of Life stories. They're making this character stand out. You also need to weave them in to the story so they aren't random - if I used my mother's 'the bed can't be wrinkled', that would come up just before bed, one character wanting to jump right in and zonk out while the other insists the bed needs to be made first, or worse, tries to make the bed around the other character, frustrating them both.

The same is true for events. In Handcuffs & Lace, the female lead walks into a gas station in a very nice dress and barefoot. This causes a few looks, which she - on a lark - acknowledges it out loud, because it is just one of those odd nights. Later in the same book, the two characters are outside making out when they're caught in a sudden and strong rainstorm. Life is like that, with moments either odd, embarrassing, or just inconvenient that are otherwise random. In SOL these can either add the feel of real life, or contribute in small ways to the plot - a character overloading one pocket on habit leading to his pants getting ripped right before an important meeting.

Where do you find these little idiosyncrasies? In real life. Observe people. It's very easy to observe the people in your life. Your family for instance are easy because you are so intimate with their habits. But watch and listen to the people around you. Sitcoms are also another good one, like Rosanne or Seinfeld or Grounded for Life, where very flawed people deal with the random, inconvenient and hectic life.

Finally, simple things also lead to larger things. To give a small example, think of the last fight you had with your significant other/parent/roommate. Was that fight over something small, like leaving the socks on the floor or not remembering to pick up new milk? Probably. But the issues that are being fought over are likely deeper, either reflecting about the person and the way they see how the world works, or about an issue at the core of the relationship, like a lack of respect, a power dynamic or an unresolved issue that's allowed to fester and you're just fighting over the symptoms or latest manifestation. Or they could be spill-over - is the individual mad about something, but won't address it? Have they had a bad day and are picking any insignificant thing to bicker over?

There's this moment in Rosanne where they're moving Rosanne's daughter Darlene into her college dorm. Darlene has unpacked her underwear into a dresser drawer, and Rosanne says, "You have to put it in the top drawer. That's where underwear goes." Darlene says no. At the end of the scene where they discuss Darlene now being on her own yet Rosanne still being her mother, Darlene leaves the room first - and Rosanne puts Darlene's underwear in the top drawer. That little gesture is GREAT. Now, this small act could be seen as just OCD, but it's more Rosanne flexing the last bit of control she can because Darlene is now living on her own. Still, it makes Rosanne real because she can't let that unimportant thing go.

Oh, and a word about fighting. How does your character fight? Are they just passive aggressive? Do they immediately start dragging everything the other person has ever done into this squabble? Do they just shout and call names? Hurl and break things? Because in SOL your character Will be getting into verbal skirmishes, so figure out how they act in those arguments.

The core of these tips is to get a good handle how people are. Capture how the people around you behave, filter that through your writing skills, and you are on the right track to writing good slice of life.