When novelists such as Dickens and Faulkner talk about their writing process, most professors don’t take them seriously.

Charles Dickens and William Faulkner said that they didn’t invent most of what they wrote. Once their characters came to life, subjectively, they wrote what their characters told them.

But most professors would insist that Dickens and Faulkner were speaking metaphorically or simply joking. After all, they reason, novelists might have their artistic peculiarities, but they are not crazy.

In contrast, when I read Dickens and Faulkner, and they discuss something as important to them as their writing process, I do take them seriously. There are just too many other novelists, for too many years, who have said similar things.

And in my psychiatric opinion, it doesn’t mean that they are crazy. It means that they have a normal, creative, literary type of multiple personality.