While it is your job to know a great deal about your characters, it is seldom necessary to share it all with the reader, and by "seldom," we mean "never." You, an author, are providing a service to the reader: the service of telling a story. When you call somebody to provide you with a service, the IT guy for example, do you want to hear everything he knows about C++ machine language, SSID encoding, and public key encryption before he tells you how to get back online?

A great many plot problems that show up in unpublished manuscripts can be resolved with a single strategy. Know what the chase is, and cut to it. Do not write hundreds of pages without knowing the story you really want to tell. Do not write hundreds of pages explaining why you want to tell the story you are about to tell, why the characters are living the way they are when the story begins, or what past events made the characters into people who would have loved that story. Write hundreds of pages of the story, or else you'll find that what you write will not be shelved in the libraries of the future but will instead form the landfill upon which those libraries are built.

One of the first stumbling blocks a novelist must overcome is the misapprehension that what is of interest to him will necessarily be of interest to anybody else. A novel is never an opportunity to vent about the things that your roommates, friends, or mother cannot bear to listen to one more time.

Unpublished authors often cite the case of John Kennedy Toole, who, unable to find a publisher for his novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, took his own life. Thereafter, his mother relentlessly championed the book, which was eventually published to great acclaim and earned him a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Yes, we say, that is a strategy, but it is a strategy that demands a remarkable level of commitment from the author's mother, and an even greater commitment from the author. And, of course, it puts a serious crimp on the book tour. But even more to the point, it will work only if you have in fact written a masterpiece that awaits only the further enlightenment of the publishing industry and the reading public to receive the treatment it deserves.

Do not think of us as traffic cops, or even driving instructors. Think of us instead as your onboard navigation system, available day or night, a friendly voice to turn to whenever you look up, lost and afraid, and think "How the fuck did I end up here?"