BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

— Share site with friends.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Clarification of Yesterday’s Post, with a Quote from Toni Morrison

When Dickens and Faulkner said that they got most of what they wrote from their characters, you might have thought, “Well, so what? All you are saying is that they imagined that their characters told them these things.”

Well, yes, they did imagine it, but not in the usual sense of imagining. For example, suppose I wanted to decide what to have for lunch. I would imagine various foods and decide which I preferred. In doing that, I would have the subjective sense that “I” was in charge of the process and that “I” was doing the imagining.

But that is not what Dickens and Faulkner said happened in their writing process. Their subjective experience was not that they imagined most of what they wrote, but that the characters did. They experienced the characters as being independent, thinking beings with minds of their own (which is the essence of multiple personality).

Novelists experience their characters as real. How real? As Toni Morrison said (see post of October 26, 2013), “much more real than real people.”
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to comment (whether you agree or disagree) and ask questions (simple or expert). I appreciate your contribution.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)