In praise of padding (the good kind)

Last week someone – not a writer -asked how my current novel is going, and I tried to explain that I knew what events were going to take place, but was still struggling to write the rest of it. Oh, she said, so you know what will happen, you’re just padding it out? Well I couldn’t deny it, but padding has such a bad name, and the more I think about it the more I realise it’s the ‘padding’ that makes a novel what it is. I don’t mean meaningless bulk – empty description or redundant characters...