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.

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Sunday, May 18, 2014

How I Write Novels Using My Multiple Personality: A Literary Genre That is Inevitable

But is it inevitable? Is it even possible? Could novelists write such books? And if they could, would they want to?

First, how many novelists even know that they have multiple personality? I have cited Margaret Atwood as saying that she and other novelists have known about it for at least one hundred and fifty years. But do they have more than a very vague idea about it?

Second, how would they write such a book? Would one identity be in charge? Which one? Would each identity get a chapter? The process seems problematic.

Third, would such a project disrupt the novelist’s usual creative process and make future novels less likely?

Fourth, would such books be like telling everyone how magic tricks work, and take all the fun out of reading novels?

I think such books are inevitable, and that the only questions are: sooner or later, first or last.

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