Get the character moving

There I was (had for so long been): on page 44 of my Seville novel, stopped and going no further. The tone was working, the characters seemed alive, the momentum was building, and then, smack—I was up against a wall.

Page 44 was a misery. I couldn't move forward at all.

But yesterday a client canceled a conference call, and suddenly I had this gift of two unexpected hours in a day that had begun in a corporate rush at two a.m. Two hours, and even the construction crew down the street had stopped banging against whatever it is they've been banging against, and I took out that mean and haggardly page 44 and hovered.

Suddenly I understood what had been wrong all along: I'd had my character sitting when she needed to be walking, when she needed to be going somewhere. If she moved, the plot would move. If she moved, I'd be forced to slice page 44 free of its lovely lull of detail.

I'd written the lines that I next excised more than ten years ago, clung to them for a decade. Yesterday, I gave them up, stood my character up, had her trail across the cortijo courtyard in a rising storm of dust.

Page 45.

It can all seem so easy, in retrospect.