Nobel Prize Novelist Saul Bellow credits an alternate personality, who has been “advising” Bellow since his “earliest years,” as his “fastidious” co-writer

“I suppose that all of us have a primitive prompter or commentator within, who from earliest years has been advising us, telling us what the real world is. There is such a commentator in me. I have to prepare the ground for him. From this source come words, phrases, syllables; sometimes only sounds, which I try to interpret, sometimes whole paragraphs, fully punctuated. When E. M. Forster said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” he was perhaps referring to his own prompter…

“When I say the commentator is primitive, I don't mean that he's crude; God knows he's often fastidious. But he won't talk until the situation's right. And if you prepare the ground for him with too many difficulties underfoot, he won't say anything. I must be terribly given to fraud and deceit because I sometimes have great difficulty preparing a suitable ground. This is why I've had so much trouble with my last two novels. I appealed directly to my prompter. The prompter, however, has to find the occasion perfect—that is to say, truthful, and necessary. If there is any superfluity or inner falsehood in the preparations, he is aware of it…” (from Bellow’s 1966 Paris Review interview).

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4405/the-art-of-fiction-no-37-saul-bellow

The only thing in the above with which I would take issue is Bellow’s assumption that “all of us” have this kind of alternate personality, or have an alternate personality of any kind. My guess is that no more than 30% of the general public has any alternate personalities (in what I call “normal multiple personality”). But if by “all of us” he was referring only to novelists, then I wouldn’t disagree, since most novelists, perhaps 90%, do have a normal version of multiple personality, which is the subject of this blog.