Not quite bogged axle deep, but close, or so it felt. I had the start of the story, then … episodes, but no true plot, nothing driving the story, nothing disturbing the protagonist from cruising along the way he was used to doing. Which might work for certain types of literary fiction, but not for this book. Readers don’t want an exciting (or mysterious) start and then nothing for a couple hundred pages. The antagonist, or possibly two of them, had arrived and were not doing anything.

Right. Time to go back to the books, in this case Swain and one I’d not read before, but saw on a friend’s bookshelf and started nibbling before I bought my own copy. How do you get a plot moving? You make the protagonist miserable … or at least shake up his/her/it/who knows’ world. The MC has to get knocked out of his rut and forced to make some choices. In some ways, he’s not truly mature, not really an adult. If the story is going to move, that has to change.

So, what would make the MC stop observing and start doing. Well, he was already doing, but not … book-hero doing. Internal conflict was just not there, neither did he face a clear antagonist. He would have to stand up and make hard choices, and be willing to sacrifice everything. Or to have everything ripped away and be forced to mature and rise to the moment, face the enemy/antagonist/villain and do what had to be done. Hmmm. What did the MC value the most?

This is where I had to step back and really think about the MC, his values, and what he thought the most important in his life. I had not done that. I didn’t know his Big Picture motivation. In other words, it was time for serious soul-of-author and soul-of-MC searching and working out what the character’s deepest values were and how to show those in the story before everything went to heck. Or before the antagonist made himself or itself known. I’d been foreshadowing something, but what was it?

This is the point where, after I sorted out what the Big Problem was going to be, and what the MC valued so highly, and what his two greatest weaknesses were, I realized that this wasn’t exactly the character-driven novel I thought I was working on. Oops. This is in part a milieu novel, where the setting is driving the story to an extent. That gave me, perhaps, an antagonist, but not enough of one, maybe. I still had several options for villain, and again returned to the sketching board to work out which of them, if either, would be the MC’s problem.

Now, I am experienced enough that reading the two books (Swain and Chester), then really forcing myself to dig into the MC and his world and fellow characters, I could find the problem and start working out how to fix said problem. When I hit things in Chester that made me balk and twitch, that was a CLUE that my subconscious realized the problem. This doesn’t work for everyone. I didn’t have to sit down with the plot-thus-far and sketch out every rising and falling action, all the characters and their motivations. Someone else might, or might find it a useful guide for the next part of the story. If you can’t find the main conflict, you need to add one, or really dig into the characters and situations thus far, and sort out what makes everything work or not work.