Who Are a Novelist’s Major Personalities?

1. Recurring Characters
2. Special Minor Characters
3. Alternate Narrators

The first category of major personalities, recurring characters, is obvious, but the second category is not. Occasionally, a novelist will have a minor character who is more rounded, specific, and/or idiosyncratic than the novel would seem to require. For example, the character plays a certain type of music on the harpsichord, which is in no way really necessary to the novel. But it just happens that the novelist relaxes by playing that kind of music on the harpsichord in real life. This is probably a significant personality in the novelist’s real life.

Alternate narrators, who publish their own novels under pseudonyms, are obvious candidates for the category of major personalities. Less obvious are alternate narrators whose writing is published under the novelist’s regular name. Their writing appears as novels that are different from the novelist’s usual writing or as parts of a novelist’s regular novels that express a different viewpoint.

For example, I read a novel which began with character A as the main character and character B as the villain. But in the second half of the novel, character A was a minor character, while character B was the main character, whose evil actions in the first half were virtually forgotten. Yet the novel was written by such an accomplished writer that this inconsistency was not noted in reviews. With other novels, inconsistencies are noticed, but they are explained away as intentional and literary, because the novelist is obviously a very good writer.

What do novelists, themselves, think of these inconsistencies? They may avoid thinking about it and consider it part of the wonderful mystery of artistic creativity. But it is one reason that many novelists don’t like to explain their work. It is difficult for them to explain it, because the novelist you are interviewing is only one of the narrating personalities. And they may simply not know what the other narrators were thinking when they wrote this or that. They may not even know that they have other narrators.