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.