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.

— Share site with friends.

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Eudora Welty, Charles Dickens, and Sue Grafton are not weird; they are normal fiction writers, says Multiple Identity Literary Theory

Interviewer: Do you mean you sound out a story when you write it?
Eudora Welty: I just hear it when I’m writing it. It comes to me that way. In everything I read. I hear the voice of I know not Who. Not my voice. I hear everything being read to me as I read it off the page (1, p. 269).

Eudora Welty: I write for the sake of the story. The story is everything. I am just the instrument (1, p. 346).

Interviewer: Please talk about how you feel or the state you’re in when you’re hard at work on a story or a novel.
Eudora Welty: I think you’re unconscious of the state you’re in, because you’re not thinking about yourself…The work teaches you about the work ahead…What your mind does is so peculiar…It was on automatic drive…
Interviewer: It was as if, at some level in you, the whole thing was there, and pieces were just floating up…
Eudora Welty: It was really weird. The mind is very strange (2, pp. 173-175).

Eudora Welty says that she hears a voice of someone—she doesn’t know who is speaking—but she’s sure it’s not her own voice. She, herself, is the tool or instrument of the story that is provided to her. Her own mind, controlled by the voice and story, is on automatic. It’s as if the story was already there and floats up to her consciousness.

Welty says that the creative writing process is “weird” and “the mind is very strange.” But readers of this blog know that Welty is not weird or strange, because we have heard other great fiction writers say similar things. To cite two examples: Charles Dickens confided that he, himself, did not “invent” his characters and stories. And Sue Grafton says that she has several personalities, that her novels seem to exist before she writes them, and that she just “discovers” them.

Multiple Identity Literary Theory says that these writers are not weird, strange, or crazy. They have a normal, literary version of multiple personality, and make professional use of it.

1. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw (ed). Conversations with Eudora Welty. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1984.
2. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw (ed). More Conversations with Eudora Welty. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1996.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to comment (whether you agree or disagree) and ask questions (simple or expert). I appreciate your contribution.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)