the"butt in the chair" commitment

As a recovering journalist, I face fiction with some trepidation, but I find my time spent in radio news and copywriting has helped give me an ear for dialog, and, as Elizabeth George has said, "Character is story. Dialogue is character." And so I continue to plug away, unglamorously, word by word.

This fall I read through the whole manuscript and deleted half of it--everything from one of the character's points of view. How hard it was to toss those pages--and how freeing to fix something wrong with your story and have it move so much more fluidly.