On Author Interviews and what if 90% of novelists do have multiple personality

Which of the novelist’s identities do you plan to interview? If you don’t consider this, you may be interviewing the novelist’s host personality, who may have had only a peripheral role in writing the novel. Is that whom you want to interview?

You might ask the novelist how many different identities were involved in writing this novel, and which of them will participate in the interview. If the novelist is not acquainted with multiple identity literary theory, and doesn’t understand what you mean, you can substitute “parts of your mind” for “identities.”

Or you can say that many novelists have more than one voice, narrator, and/or character who have played active roles in producing a novel, and only they can give a truly inside perspective on how the novel was written. 

So each of them is invited to participate in this interview, letting the interviewer know, at any given time, which of them is speaking.

Now, this approach may not work with some novelists, because it is the host personality’s job to do interviews, and the other identities may feel that interviews are simply not what they do.

Not to mention that some novelists will suspect that you are trying to trick them into admitting that they have multiple personality, and they may feel that such an admission would be harmful to their reputation.

But this approach will be acceptable to other novelists, especially if their various identities have already participated in past interviews: each one coming out when a particular question happened to address their issues. So the only difference this time will be that the different identities acknowledge their presence when speaking.

And regarding reputation, the novelist may realize that the public will interpret their multiple personality as having been a joke, anyway. After all, the public has always considered it a joke when novelists have told how a character tried to take over and get the story written their way. As Mark Twain said, when he told the truth, nobody believed him.