Novelists' Multiple Personality TRAIT: Key to Creativity

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.

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Sunday, March 22, 2015

Shyness or Normal Multiple Personality? Hana Schank’s “Writing My Way to a New Self” in today’s New York Times Sunday Review

The writer describes how she had been introverted when meeting people in person, but extroverted when contacting people by letter.

She says, “Of course I’d been a different person in my letter. I’d been writing.”

And when she overcomes her problem, she says, “It was as though my writing self and my public self had begun to merge into one whole person.”

My question is why Hana Schank—author of the forthcoming book “The Edge of Normal”—poses the issue in terms of alternate selves rather than shyness.

I guess she poses the issue that way, because that was her subjective experience. She didn’t feel like one shy person, but rather like two people.