I recently entered a stage of writing where I had a lot of scenes, but I needed to knit them all together to make them into a draft. Not a hodgepodge of scenes, but something more flowing, something that could make sense, that would draw a reader along. So I sat down to do just that. What I realised when I did was that characters popped up here and there, after being in hybernation for a chapter or two or five. Suddenly, there they were demanding to be let back into the story. Well, I wanted to let them in, but I had to ask them first "What have you been doing all this time?"
So here's what I did. I started right back at the begining and read over the manuscript with one character in mind. Is this somewhere we see that character? Should we have a little reference to her here? I did this four times with found main characters, and somehow, now my scenes flow together. There's still a l of work to do to get this manuscript finished, but there's a lot less than there used to be, and the characters seem way way way more alive.
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I like your question for your characters, "Where have you been?" I've been working on my novel too, filling in places where I needed more information about shrikes. It was a comment from an outside reader that helped me. She simply told me she was really interested in the information about the Eastern Loggerhead Shrike, an endangered bird of prey/songbird. I was trying so hard not to overwhelm my reader with scientific information, I had underwhelmed instead.
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