A Study of Fifty Writers…

The Illusion of Independent Agency:

Do adult fiction writers experience their

characters as having minds of their own?

Marjorie Taylor, Sara D. Hodges, Adele Kohanyi

Imagination, Cognition and Personality, Vol 22(4) 361-380, 2002-2003

https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/4/2521/files/2013/03/Taylor-Hodges-Kohanyi_2003-2b6wdel.pdf

Yes, ninety-two percent of the fifty fiction writers did experience that. They interacted with, and heard the voices of, their characters. They provided dramatic examples of characters who not only composed their own life histories, but also attempted to take control of the plot away from the writer. Some of the characters were even experienced by the writers as “leaving the pages of the writers’ stories to inhabit the writers’ everyday worlds (e.g., wandering around the house).”

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Three Degrees of Multiplicity

by Kenneth A. Nakdimen, M.D.

1. Multiple Roles, Not Multiple Personality

Like most people, she has many roles in life. She is a scientist, musician, wife, aunt, friend, daughter, writer, breast-feeding mother, golfer, churchgoer, and painter, among other things. When she is at her lab, if you ask her about being a nursing mother, she identifies with being both a nursing mother and a scientist. Indeed, she always identifies with all of her roles, because she has the same memory bank and identity no matter which role she is engaged in at the moment. In short, she has one multifaceted “I,” which adapts to all of her roles.

2. Normal Multiple Personality

A different woman with the same roles (see above) is at her own lab. If you ask her about being a nursing mother, she may or may not remember or know about that. In any case, she does not identify with doing that. It is done by someone else. However, she won’t tell you that, since she knows it would sound crazy. (In fact, neither multiple personality nor multiple personality disorder is a psychosis.)

You can’t tell by looking at her that this is going on. The essence of multiple personality is not its outward behavior.  The essence is the subjective experience of having more than one “I” or consciousness, with each self having a mind of its own.

While it is dramatic to see an identity come out and wander around the house (see study, above), most of the life of the identities in multiple personality takes place inside, behind the scenes, as is most common for the characters of a novelist. 

As you can see from the study of fifty fiction writers, multiple personality is surprisingly common and often constructive. It is not a mental disorder in most cases.

3. Multiple Personality Disorder

Multiple personality becomes multiple personality disorder, a mental illness, if and when it causes the person a significant amount of distress or dysfunction.

Fortunately, the distress and dysfunction may be resolved — changing multiple personality disorder into normal multiple personality — if the identities can learn to cooperate. Unfortunately, this childhood onset disorder is usually not diagnosed until adulthood, by which time the identities may be quite set in their ways and in conflict.

Writing novels is not something that every person can do, but for those who can, it may be a good lifestyle for helping the identities to cooperate. Novels take all kinds of characters, interests, skills, and imagination, which means that there is something for every kind of identity to contribute.

One cause of “writer’s block” may be a temporary breakdown in the identities’ cooperation.

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