Memoir Writers Beware: These Reality Show Scandals Pose A Hazard To Us All

This spring has seen a whole slew of reality show scandals, from Susan Boyle's meteoric rise and flame-out, to the vote gerrymandering on American Idol that resulted in the defeat of talented gay contestant Adam Lambert, to the latest revelations about Jon & Kate--which are deeply at odds with the story line of their TV show. These tabloid flaps have certainly helped boost the sagging fortunes of the print and broadcast media, as the minutiae have unfolded day after day. My concern, from a writer's perspective, is that the public has now gotten so cynical about the veracity of these "scripted reality" shows that all stories purporting to be "real" or "true" have become suspect, and people are reading even the most heartfelt memoir with a jaundiced eye. 

And tabloid culture isn't only to blame. We memoir writers have certainly had our own share of scandals, from James Frey's stint on Oprah's couch to the Rosenblat memoir scandal. My fear is that the public today is reading memoir not for the story, but for the gaps in the story. See my latest essay on Blogcritics elaborating on this subject. This kind of hypervigilance has, I think, got a way of magnifying even the smallest lapses of memory or factual inaccuracies. We memoir writers--most of us--do our best to capture everything as it happened. But, truthfully, who can be absolutely certain about every single detail, especially if what you are writing about happened long ago, as is often the case. Too, there is the problem that someone else may remember things differently, and be willing to stand up before the world and say so--making you, the writer, look a liar.

It all makes me fearful for the writers I work with, and for all memoir writers, that our audience is scrutinizing us in this way. I don't think the current environment of constant suspicion is healthy, even if it is perhaps necessary to curb the worst of the recent abuses. Still, it has become something of a "cat and mouse" game, with the media seeking after any slippage--or alleged slippage. After this bracing period of reminder that, yes, there is such a thing as The Truth, I dearly hope our readers can go back to reading our work for the story, instead of for the holes in the story.

One final note on an unrelated (and happier) subject: I am posting this week and next from the New York State Summer Writers Conference at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs. So if you see photographs of horse statues suddenly popping up on Kim's Craft Blog, they are the lovely life-sized thoroughbreds local artists decorate each summer and dot around Saratoga, celebrating the new racing season and the town's historical connection to the sport of horse racing. You can follow the author events I attend by surfing this link over to the Kim's Craft Blog page on Twitter. 

Micropublishing Fiction with Guest Blogger Daniel M. Jaffe

Poets have long published their work in brief, artistically manufactured books called chapbooks. These books are often printed on fine, low-acid papers and hand-stitched in small print runs to satisfy a "niche" poetry market not served by the larger presses. Lately, though, I have been thinking that the moment of the "fiction chapbook" may have arrived. Chapbooks can make sense for fiction writers in a world where we own fewer books, and where the reach of even a short print run may be extended through digital means. Apparently, I was not alone in thinking along these lines. Recently, I got an email from a writer I know, Daniel M. Jaffe, who had just published his own fiction chapbook. I immediately invited Dan to be a guest blogger on Kim's Craft Blog, and to tell us how he came to decide he had a project that was right for "micropublishing," and what the process was like. Here is Dan's story:

I've been writing fiction seriously for the past 20 years.  My 3 books and hundred or so short pieces have been published thanks to the efforts of overworked professionals at medium and small presses, journals, and newspapers.   

My most recent publication experience was with One-Foot Lover, a fiction chapbook published by Seven Kitchens Press, a small publishing house located in Pennsylvania and run by my old pal, the prize-winning poet, Ron Mohring. Ron and I met while studying for our MFA's together more than a decade ago at Vermont College. We fell out of touch for a while, and then, when he was working as one of the fiction editors at Bucknell University's literary journal, West Branch, he asked if I had any stories for him to consider publishing there.  I sent him, "One-Foot Lover," my story about a university student who falls in love with a one-legged dancer.  Ron chose not to include the story in West Branch.  I can't say I was surprised:  in various iterations, "One-Foot Lover" had been rejected a total of 60 times, even though it had garnered more supportive feedback from editors than any other of my short stories these past 20 years.  Also, it had won me First Place in the Literature Competition sponsored by the John E. Profant Foundation for the Arts. I don't like all my stories, and I have retired literally dozens of them after they were soundly rejected; but "One-Foot Lover" felt special, and I really believed in it, so I continued submitting it to journals. 

Then, half a year after Ron turned it down for West Branch, he emailed to say that he couldn't stop thinking about the story, and, by the way, did I know that he'd established his own small press a couple of years before?  No, I hadn't known.  It turned out that Ron had been publishing beautiful, hand-sewn poetry chapbooks.  It also turned out that he'd been thinking about expanding his publishing list to include fiction chapbooks, and would I be interested in having my story, "One-Foot Lover," be his first?  He cautioned that there wouldn't be much money involved, that the print run would be small because each chapbook would be handmade.  I jumped at the chance to see my story transformed into such a tangible work of art.

The publication process was delightfully intimate, making me feel that here was a publisher for whom my story was as special as it was for me.  Ron's a meticulous editor, so he posed some helpful suggestions about adjusting words and phrases here and there, and then he included me in the process of physical creation of the book—he sent me pdf files of proofs, even mailed me sample copies. Also, we batted around ideas for covers, and he found the one we ultimately used, a painting by Brian O'Conner that captured "One-Foot Lover's" imagery in a powerful yet indirect way.  So as to honor the story's title and plotline, Ron chose a font called "Footlight." ("I couldn't resist!" he said.)  He asked me to write up an Afterword describing how the story had come to be written, which I was thrilled to do because I wanted to pay tribute to my friend Catherine Cole who, after losing a leg to cancer, went on tour with the very dance performance that inspired my story. 

My understanding is that it takes Ron half an hour to assemble one chapbook, sewing each copy on his sewing machine.  He color-coordinates the thread with the inks on the front cover, and numbers each chapbook.  Ron even mailed me a set of title pages to sign so that he could sew them into 25 autographed copies.  Wow!  To have my work handled with such loving care was nothing less than an honor.  And I think how, in a way, this chapbook connects me to the first authors ever published—Centuries ago, the first books were, after all, handmade.

DANIEL M. JAFFE, a prize-winning fiction writer, is the author of the novel The Limits of Pleasure; compiler-editor of With Signs and Wonders: An International Anthology of Jewish Fabulist Fiction; and translator of Here Comes the Messiah!, a Russian novel by Dina Rubina. Dan's short fiction, personal essays, and literary translations have appeared in dozens of anthologies and literary journals in the U.S. and abroad. Dan teaches creative writing in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. For more information about guest blogger Daniel M. Jaffe, visit his personal website.

Late Spring Blues (Or Early Summer Blues)

This is the time of year when a lot of us writers are sorting through the damage that we've done to our offices over the past year, and figuring out what succeeded and what did not, and where to go next with our writing, or with the marketing of our writing. Many of us are looking ahead to writers conferences over the summer, and trying to decide what to bring with us, or what to write. And then there is the eternal question of, Is it too late in the year to still be submitting work? Here, in no particular order, are my thoughts, and a few links from around the web that you may want to check out.

First, is it me? Or was this a particularly hard year? I have to say, I feel positively slammed by work.

It felt like there was just too much to do this year, and although I accomplished a lot (including starting this blog), it seemed as if I couldn't possibly get everything done, and much of it had to do with the transition to digital we are all experiencing. While I have embraced this new technology wholeheartedly, it has also been enormously time consuming--both learning to use the new technologies, and then figuring out how they fit into my writing life, and then actually using them. I have spent a huge amount of time over the past year blogging, Twittering, and posting to the Facebook groups that run alongside my workshops, as well as reading other writers' Tweets and blog posts. I haven't even kept up with the writers forums that I have posted on, and meant to frequent more often.

Submitting, too, has become more complicated, with everything being duplicated. I now have lists of both print and online places to submit, and as a result everything seems to be taking twice as long. It's actually rather exciting. The online markets seem hungrier to me than the older print markets, especially for new voices. But you also don't want to abandon the older, more established print venues that can really make a writer's reputation. (See the Kim's Craft Blog sidebar for a list of literary journals.)

On the other hand, though, there are only so many hours in the day, or years in a writer's life, and lately I find that I've been opting to publish my essays through a blog network, where I know they will appear quickly, before they get stale. I can also instantly publicize my work through Twitter and Facebook, and through other social media sites. Of course, everyone else is doing this too, and every day it's more of a struggle to fight your way through the fray. Still, the old routine of submit and then wait for six months to a year for a reply felt especially unsatisfactory this year, didn't it? And I was glad to see a number of the literary journals I admire shortening up their response times, and upgrading their websites with good online archives. This is the first year I've felt that the things I published absolutely had to show up online, and fairly quickly.

Looking forward with my own work, it feels like I'm having to consider this "brave new world" in deciding what to write. On the web, it seems as if there are many "fast" publishing venues for shorter pieces, including personal essays, short memoir pieces, and short stories, as well as poetry and flash fiction. But the digital age has continued to erode the markets for longer work like novels and book-length memoirs. The economy is also partly to blame.

This may account for the increase in self-publishing over the past year, though the options for that are in an enormous state of flux as well. Even if you decide to self-publish, how are you going to do it? Are you going to publish directly to Kindle, use an ePublisher like Smashwords, or a document uploading service like Scribd.com? Or will you use a POD or a "vanity" print press, or "micropublish" your own chapbooks? Or perhaps you will do an audio recording--some authors seem to be breaking in that way. See the Publetariat website for a comparison of some of the options. Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn has also compiled a mother lode of information in this area. And how are you going to assure that your writing doesn't get lost in the digital avalanche? I read somewhere that the average self-published book sells something like 200 copies. So you'd better have a marketing plan.

I don't think the publishing options are easy to sort through, especially when the range of alternatives seems to change by the day. Even the digital reading gadgets are changing day to day, with the acceleration of smart phone applications, and the regular rollouts of the various generations of digital reading devices such as the Kindle and the Sony Reader. What's a writer to do? It's enough to make you want to shut off everything electronic, and go bury your head in the sand of some beach for the summer, and see where it all is in the fall. I'm afraid I don't have any solid advice to offer, except that I do think it makes sense to try and stay educated on these technologies and to use them as much as you can to your own advantage.

For those still submitting this late in the year to presses, agents and magazines, agent Nathan Bransford has a good post on his blog about how to format your manuscripts. This is a question that always comes up in my writing workshops, and now I can point writers to this excellent blog post. As for whether it's too late in the year to submit, see Nannette Croce's excellent post on the subject at the zine writer blog. My own take on this is that you should ask yourself whether the place you are submitting is likely to have summer interns. Summer is often the perfect time to submit because there is actually someone there to read your work and pass it along to an editor. On the other hand, lots of presses and journals pretty much mothball themselves for the summer. If there's a reading period cut-off in June, you probably don't want to be submitting at the last minute. Finally, for those heading off to writers conferences, check out the Procrastinating Writers blog for "How to get the most out of a writing critique." Good luck with your writing over the summer everyone.

What the Scribd Deal with Simon & Schuster Means for the Future of Publishing

Anyone who has been reading my Tweets over the past week already knows that I have been disappointed with how few of the books I want for my summer reading are available on my Kindle. I thought Amazon had the right idea with Kindle (low pricing to thwart piracy, instant wireless for low purchasing barriers, long battery life, and easy on the eyes). However, it appears that thus far Amazon has been unable to get the big publishers to make many of their "new reads" available on Kindle, at least judging from my own experience trying to buy new books. With the announcement today by Simon & Schuster that it will make 5,000 titles available for sale on Scribd.com, a document-sharing website, it appears that the future of publishing is now moving in a new direction.

Until now, Scribd has been one of those sleepy backwaters on the Internet, a place where you could upload and share documents, sort of like a photo-sharing site, like Flickr. It was a "YouTube for text," if you will. As with YouTube, there is an "embed" function on Scribd, so that uploaded text documents can be embedded in blogs and other website, as is widely done with photos and videos. There is also a "share" function so that it's easy to share uploaded documents through social bookmarking sites, like Digg and Stumbleupon. And as with YouTube, the person uploading documents can have a "channel." (As a writer, you might want to call this an "imprint.")

What has really changed things recently, is that Scribd has added an e-commerce store, where uploaded documents (read books) can be sold to purchasers--which apparently is what got the attention of Simon & Schuster and some of the other big publishers.

So, how does this alter the direction of book publishing?

Well, here's the thing. These developments have all been happening alongside the rapid rollout of applications for smart phones, such as the Apple iPhone. What is now possible is this scenario: A new book is released by a publisher and is instantly made available on Scribd (or some other text-uploading service with an e-commerce store) at a discount off the bookstore list price. Unlike with Amazon, which charges chronically low prices, the publisher retains control of pricing. Book review bloggers get review copies and can then "embed" the book they are reviewing right in their blog or website as they do the review (possibly taking a cut of the action, via an affiliate relationship, as Amazon now has with many websites). Readers can purchase the book digitally and shoot it directly to their smart phones for reading, using the appropriate book-reading applications. And lest you think this is some distant pipe dream, let me quote from Brad Stone's story in this morning's New York Times:

[Scribd] says it is working on a reading application for the iPhone, which should be ready in a few weeks.

Kindle, of course, already has an iPhone application. However, as noted, Kindle hasn't had the books previously, so digital downloads haven't really cut into bookstore business much. The Scribd model, though, once it's up and running, may start to make bookstores look like buggy whips. And publishers shouldn't get too smug about controlling prices. As with music downloads, it takes low prices to discourage piracy. And piracy potentially seems like a huge problem with text documents--in a world where text can so easily be scanned. Hmmm. Maybe Amazon had the right idea with Kindle after all .  . ..

In Defense of The Writing Workshop

Last night, two events coincided: I taught my last creative writing workshop for the term, and afterwards finally had a moment to sit down and really read, over dinner, Louis Menand's essay in last week's New Yorker, "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught." The combination of reflecting back on a semester's worth of writing workshops, and Menand's dour pronouncements, made me feel quite fierce about teaching creative writing, so here is my Defense of The Writing Workshop. 

The view that "creative writing cannot be taught" is periodically dusted off by prominent writers and academics for examination. My own favorite harangue on the subject is Madison Smartt Bell's, in the opening of his book Narrative Design, where he argues rather convincingly that good writing is a function of the unconscious creative imagination, and flows best in "psychological privacy" free from the workshop's "enormous, crushing pressures to conform." Bell accurately points out that "no stories are originally written on craft intelligence alone," and that workshops are mainly critical and corrective, and therefore somewhat antithetical to the very process of writing.

Menand's essay promotes the even more cynical view that, in essence, the current system of creative writing instruction is something of a sophisticated Ponzi scheme designed mainly to support academic practitioners with minimum effort on their part, by placing untutored students in charge of teaching each other. As Menand's opening so deftly puts it:

Creative writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. 

I guess my main trouble with this view is that it presumes the total absence in creative writing classrooms of able instructors of writing craft, which is hardly the rule. While I'm sure that there are extremely lazy professors in the world who do nothing but throw a group of creative writing students into a room and let them start performing intellectual jujitsu on each other, I have taught and taken many creative writing workshops over the years, including being a student in a fine university MFA program, and I can testify that this is not the norm.

Most creative writing teachers present craft topics in units, assisting students in exploring the range of options available to them while they write, such as with say with Openings for example. There are many ways to open a story, and exploring some of them may broaden a student's reach the next time he or she is pressed to write one. Examples of different types of successful writing are usually provided, and students often find these examples to be the most helpful part of instruction, because they are not only models for imitation and emulation, but also goads to higher achievement. Craft instruction is an important part of the workshop model today, and why wouldn't it be? You would never ask a student in the visual arts to paint a painting without first studying closely what had already been done by other painters. Creative writing is no different, and craft examples and extensive readings are a part of any good creative writing program or class.

And now to that pesky workshop model--which seems to come in for the most censure from everyone who looks at the subject. While it is true that, at some point in class, we instructors do generally throw out student manuscripts in front of the other students for "critique" or "workshop," the fact that is usually missed is that, for a creative writing student, his fellow students provide an invaluable asset. They are a group of captive readers who are no more schooled in writing than your average Barnes & Noble browser. And yet they have to read the student's work; they have no choice. This is, for most aspiring writers--who lack an audience--an unrivaled gift.  Immediate feedback from an unwashed public. The only trouble is that often untutored readers like this are either overly flattering (if trying to curry favor), or--as is more often the case--unduly harsh upon a perceived rival writer. Again, though, as with the reading function, this critical function mirrors rather well the real world--of literary criticism and publishing, of agents, editors, and jealous rivals. And anyway, my job as a teacher presiding over this messy process is to step in and cut off unnecessarily harsh criticism, and to remind people to be courteous and supportive, and to guide the discussion with more knowledgeable comments, pointing out things that my students may have missed. As a teacher I also frequently praise the good writing I see in workshops, the flashes of insight, the deeper nuances, the especially nice passages of description. And this often provides an even more effective goad to my students, who are jealous of each others' successes. And I provide carefully designed exercises to help students focus on specific areas where they may be having trouble. 

Somehow, as a group, we always manage--nearly every time--to tweak, cajole and harrow the workshop participants into better writing. It is a slow process, though, and rather mysterious in how it works. It's an "applied" thing, and requires a long apprenticeship and lots and lots of practice, during which much is learned that is hard later to articulate because it is learned at the level of the body, the emotions, the perceptions. And progress is unpredictable. Students in my workshops often seem to dawdle along making no visible improvement for awhile, and then suddenly experience a great leap forward, usually after a period of depression or grouchiness. (In fact, I now look for grouchiness as a sign that a student is improving.)

The bottom line for me is this: Over time, the workshop method works. It can't guarantee publication or success as a writer, or an academic teaching job after you get your MFA. But, in my experience, both as a teacher and as a student, it does in the end reliably produce better writers. 

Is Kindle Best For Blogs, Newspapers and Magazines?

Exciting news! Kim's Craft Blog is now up on the Kindle (Amazon's new eReader, for anyone who has been living in a cave). Well, sort of exciting. I'm not sure this will matter, since we are of course still completely free online. On the other hand, Kindle is an inexpensive way for our readers to ingest our sometimes lengthy blog posts without eyestrain. It seems to me that the Kindle is uniquely suited to reading longform posts of the sort we often run, as well as magazine articles and newspaper stories. At least that's what I am finding. I personally tend to want to read these long--but shorter than a book--items while I'm on the go, commuting somewhere, or just reclining in bed, when I really don't want to still be bent over my laptop. I can read fairly long, text-heavy essays, articles, stories and posts without eyestrain. And everything is in one place, so I can just grab my Kindle and go. And--here's the best part--Kindle automatically updates. So I always have the latest blog posts on my Kindle, as well as the new issue of The New Yorker that is still riding around in my husband's briefcase because he plucked it out of the mail before I did. The New York Times has also automatically updated on Kindle, so I can check out the articles I missed (or didn't have time to read) in the morning. In short, I'm really liking this constantly updated, all in one place, easy on the eyes reading facility.

At this point, I have to say, I am liking the Kindle more for blogs, magazines and newspapers than for books. With a book, I still seem to prefer to sit down with the real thing, the dead trees print edition. Sorry trees. I guess this just goes to show that you never know what something's going to be good for until you actually start using it. So, yes, I'm excited to have Kim's Craft Blog up on the Kindle. It certainly seems the right place for us, if the Kindle catches on. Will it? Hard to say. I think the cost of the Kindle is still prohibitive for many people. And many others are probably just waiting for the price to come down, as inevitably happens with these electronic devices. They may also want to see which electronic reader will emerge as "the new iPod" for text. Kindle looks like the winner right now, but it's a little hard to tell at this stage. Only time will tell if Kindle really catches fire, or if it's just a "transitional gadget."

The Magic of Transitions

There is always a difficult balance between showing and telling in fiction and memoir, and the writer must constantly be working to maintain that balance. One thing that I see a lot in my workshops is writers trying to shoehorn too much narrative information and description into their scenes once the scenes are already running, which comes off as intrusive. And yet, I am always telling them to employ more scenic description and to be more athletic with their narrators to fill in needed background information. So what gives? Where is the writer to fit all of this stuff into his or her manuscript?

The answer lies in maximizing transitions.  For many writers, transitions feel like a throwaway. They are just trying to move from one scene to the next, and they think that all they need to do is use a time signal, like One month later. But they fail to note that, because they are inhabiting a moment of compressed time in moving between scenes, they are by definition "farther out" with their narrator than usual, in summary, and not as close-up with the action and characters. This is the perfect time to let our narrator do some talking, because it won't be so intrusive, and to fill in the necessary background and description. 

Since we are about to go into another scene, we can think of our transition as the lead-up to the emotional tensions in the next scene, and we can "tee up" the feelings and background that will be in play. So, to take a rough example: rather than simply having our character show up at a house in suburban Boston, we might say, by way of transition: Although she'd seen her father since the divorce, she hadn't yet seen him with his new wife, and she wasn't sure how she felt about having dinner with them. Now, when our character rings the doorbell, we already understand some of the emotions in play, and we don't have to fill in this background as we go, while the dialogue is running.

We might also take the opportunity, in our transition passage, to provide an impression of the twisty streets our character has driven through to reach the house, of the neat Colonials and Capes with their tidy lawns enclosed by picket fences. That way, when our character arrives, we already know where we are. Once inside the house, we can show just a few details that confirm, contradict or nuance these initial impressions, but the heavy lifting has already been done. The scene can now run without interruption. 

Cambridge Center Faculty Reading, on Friday, June 5, in Harvard Square

Our next Cambridge Center Faculty Reading will take place on Friday June 5th, at 7:00 p.m., at 56 Brattle Street in Harvard Square. I will be reading from my book of poems in progress. Also reading will be:

• Barbara Beckwith
  
• Daniel Gewertz
  
• Michael Koran
  
• Madeline Marget
  
• Myrna Patterson
  
• Janet Pocorobba
  
• Audrey Beth Stein
  

Barbara Beckwith will host.  All are welcome.  For more information, please contact the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

"One Lovely Blog" Award

Thank you to The Writer Today for giving Kim's Craft Blog the "One Lovely Blog" Award! I don't know who started this, but it's really a nice way for blogs to recognize each other, because the rule is, you are to pass the love along, and give the award to other blogs.  So here are the blogs that I would like to recognize as "One Lovely Blog":

• catching days
  
• Editor Unleashed
  
• Editorial Ass
  
• Openterrified
  
• The Creative Penn
  
• Write to Done
  
• zine writer

Congratulations to these bloggers, who consistently write interesting things and dig up great tidbits for everyone to share. And I'd love it if someone would leave a comment as to how this all got started. Cheers!

Character in Fiction: A Set of Approaches

Character is one of the hardest things to teach or analyze in fiction. I went to a fairly craft-heavy MFA program, and studied with several very fine teachers, but I have to say that a good understanding of character was one of the things that eluded me back then, and it has taken me years of teaching creative writing, and watching many fine students struggle with this issue, for me to come to any clarity on how to present it as a subject in the classroom. I think the trouble is that what we usually think of as "character" is hopelessly bound up with questions of motivation and plotting, so that it's very hard to bite off a small enough piece of the puzzle to talk about character as a craft matter.  I've found that what works best is to suggest some approaches for thinking about character, and to provide examples. So that is what I will do here. Hang on, here goes.

Patterns of Behavior

The first approach is to get the writer thinking about the character's behavior. Most characters react in certain unique and distinctive ways, and often a writer isn't really focused on those patterns of behavior. By getting a writer to attend to the repeated behaviors of a character, the writer can begin to hone and define character. What this does for a story or novel is to build suspense, because readers come to expect that a character will act in a certain way. And then, when the character is placed into situations where that behavior is inappropriate, the effect is to build suspense. So, for example, the tension goes way up when we know that Bridget Jones will be unable to keep herself from behaving impulsively around Mr. Right. Or, to take an extreme case, in Tobias Wolff's short story, "Bullet in the Brain" (from The Night in Question), the main character Anders is a critic and he can't stop critiquing everything around him, even when what's happening is a bank holdup and there's a gun being pointed to his head. This is an extremely tense scene because Anders can't help doing what he does because it's so utterly ingrained in his nature. It's who he is, and we pick up on this behavior pattern immediately in the story.  The only question is whether Anders will be able to change in time to save his own life. Given the title of the story, I will not be a spoiler if I tell you that he doesn't. So that's one approach, patterns of behavior.  If you want more on this avenue, take a look at Rust Hills' Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular (see "Character and Action).

Character Desire

Let's talk now about another avenue.  I was always told back in MFA school that the essence of character was "desire." That in order to be compelling, a character must want something, and want it badly. I've also heard this formulation a million times at writers conferences and elsewhere, and I have to say that it never made much sense to me. I didn't know what it meant, and I couldn't apply it. So let me try and put a gloss on it here that I think will be helpful. 

When I look at really great characters, like Humbert Humbert in Lolita or Stevens in Ishiguro's Remains of the Day, what they seem to share is a wish or fervent desire for the world--for reality--to be a certain way, or for the things they believe in--for their vision--to be true. Stevens, for example, clings to the "greatness" of England, and to his belief that his service as a butler to one of the British lords was probably the finest thing that he could have done with himself, even though it meant sacrificing his personal life. He waxes on at length about the "greatness" of the English landscape and about what it means to be a "great" butler. Humbert Humbert similarly adheres tenaciously to an aestheticized vision of prepubescent girls.

These characters hold their plots together because the drama of their stories places them into circumstances that challenge their vision, their version of reality. Humbert constantly finds himself in situations where he is forced to confront what he is really doing to Lolita. Stevens re-lives the slow sacrifice of his personal relationships with his father and his favorite housekeeper, leading up to the revelation that his former employer, Lord Darlington, was actually a Nazi sympathizer. These events challenge how these characters have lived their lives, and their very vision of reality.

Sympathy

Thus, character drives plot, and plot challenges character. What the writer needs to do, in writing for character, is to find a way to "air" the character's version of reality, whether it is through character action, as with Anders in the Wolff story, where we see Anders critiquing everything, or through the narrator--in first person, the character--expounding on the character's vision. Douglas Bauer has an excellent essay on this in his craft book, The Stuff of Fiction, where he talks about the need for the narrative to have "sympathy" for the character. By this, he does not mean that we need to like a child molester like Humbert Humbert. Rather, we need to understand "where he's coming from." Or, "see his side of the story," no matter how warped.

Plot and Action

Another point to make is that none of this counts for anything unless it is put into motion dramatically, in scene. One of the mistakes aspiring writers often make is to allow their characters to be overly passive. It is not enough simply to have a character tell us his version of life. He needs to be placed into scenes that actually test that view. And so, Stevens can tell us how "great" England is until he's blue in the face, but it's only when we see him sacrifice his personal life in scene after scene in the name of that greatness that his character really gets on the page.

The trouble with all of this is that letting a character "act as he must" can feel very unruly to the writer, as the character begins to act seemingly out of his own will. It begins to feel to the writer as if the character has taken over the plot. For a control freak like me, this can be very disconcerting. And I've often heard other writers complain about this feeling--that their characters seem to be on a tear, doing whatever they want, and completely disregarding where the writer meant to go, or where he or she wanted to end up by the end of the chapter or the book. But the character can't help himself. It's just who he is. In this way, character is embedded at a very fundamental level of personality. And I think that's why "psychological explanations" for character tend to fall flat, in novels and in stories, such as where the narrator starts telling you that the character is this way or that way because of something that happened in childhood. I don't know about you, but I tend not to buy such explanations, even with a writer as great as Nabokov. (There's a backstory explanation like this in the opening of Lolita.) I certainly don't feel that I see the character any more clearly because of psychological explanations. As with many things in fiction, actions speak louder than words. I'd much rather see Anders plunge in and start critiquing bank robbers, than to hear that he had always wanted to be a critic because his mother was herself so critical of his toilet habits when he was three. That explanation might come in later, but it isn't what's going to convince me of his character.

Interior Contradiction

For me, this kind of ingrained character rises beyond mere desire. It's a kind of contradiction within personality, the push and pull of forces inside the individual. Humbert Humbert knows that what he's doing is deeply immoral by societal standards, but there's an even stronger pull within him towards the beauty and allure of girls of a certain age.  This kind of complexity feels very real to me, and very compelling. The battle of the impulse against better judgment, of wish fulfillment against social norms. For any human being, this is a familiar problem. Often, in the plotting of character, as in life, the ending involves disillusionment, or loss of innocence. The fondly held vision of reality or the gorgeous belief of the character is relinquished, and the character is left wiser but sadder. Something beautiful has been lost, an idealized world has crumbled, the loveliness of young girls no longer overrides moral qualms about molesting them; the greatness of England no longer excuses personal sacrifice and questionable political alliances. The character understands himself for what he is, pathetic, a fool, or worse.  Or perhaps, like Anders, the character refuses to change, even when there's a gun to his head, and dies still clinging to his vision, muttering, "They is, they is, they is . . .."