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.

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Monday, June 2, 2014

Who’s Writing This? Fifty-Five Writers Joke About Having Multiple Personality

From the back cover…
“Who is really controlling the pen? Editor Daniel Halpern was profoundly curious about the creative process—so he asked fifty-five world-renowned writers to briefly muse on ‘the fictional persona behind the scenes,’ the alter(ed) ego who takes over when there is true literary work to be done.”

The fifty-five writers…
Jorge Luis Borges, Diane Ackerman, Edward Albee, Max Apple, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Frank Bidart, Roy Blount Jr., Paul Bowles, Harold Brodkey, Cecil Brown, Rosellen Brown, Robert Olen Butler, Frank Conroy, Guy Davenport, John Fowles, Paula Fox, William H. Gass, Gail Godwin, Edward Gorey, Allan Gurganus, Jim Harrison, John Hawkes, Mark Helprin, Alice Hoffman, Maureen Howard, Evan Hunter, Diane Johnson, Edward P. Jones, Ward Just, Ivan Klima, Ed Koren, Elmore Leonard, Romulus Linney, William Matthews, Peter Mayle, Leonard Michaels, James A. Michener, Arthur Miller, Czeslaw Milosz, Mary Morris, Thylias Moss, Joyce Carol Oates, Edna O’Brien, Cynthia Ozick, Darryl Pinckney, Francine Prose, Henry Roth, James Salter, Josef Skvorecky, Jane Smiley, Susan Sontag, Paul Theroux, Scott Turow, John Updike, Helen Vendler

In the context of yesterday’s post about the meaning of mirrors in Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the only quote I will make from Who’s Writing This? is by Edward Albee:

“I look at myself in the mirror and see I am not looking back at myself. I am seeing him. I am seeing him looking at me…”

Daniel Halpern (Editor). Who’s Writing This? Fifty-Five Writers on Humor, Courage, Self-Loathing, and the Creative Process. Harper Perennial, 1995.
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