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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Saturday, August 16, 2014

New York Times essay by Lev Grossman, “Finding My Voice in Fantasy,” fails to explain Writer’s Voice

Lev Grossman—author of the Magicians trilogy; and book critic for Time magazine—tells us he wrote fiction for seventeen years before discovering that “writing about magic felt like magic…I’d found my mother tongue. It turned out I did have a voice after all. I’d had it all along. I just wasn’t looking for it in the right place.” And that is how his essay ends.

But most Times readers will not understand all that he means by finding his “voice.” They will think that finding his “voice” in the fantasy genre means only that he found where his talent lies and what he loves. They will not suspect that he uses the word “voice” because he actually hears the voices of his characters. (I don’t know him. I’m only guessing, since that is what other great novelists have described about their own creative process.)

To repeat, novelists use the word “voice,” because they hear their characters’ voices. However, they don’t like to be too explicit about this when speaking to the general public, for fear that it might sound crazy. Fortunately, this kind of hearing voices is not crazy.

You can find my posts about the literary “voice” by searching (in this blog): 1.“writer’s voice,” 2.“childhood talents,” and 3.“child’s mind.”

To read what other great novelists have said about hearing the voices of their own characters, search individual novelists in this blog, such as Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Stephen King, and Toni Morrison.
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