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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Friday, May 29, 2015

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio: A Female Alternate Personality (The One From the Last Post?) Participates in The Creative Writing Process

From the first two pages:

“The writer, an old man with a white mustache…was past sixty…but something inside him was altogether young…it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight…

“In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew somewhat sleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear before his eyes. He imagined the young…thing within himself was driving a long procession of figures before his eyes…

“For an hour the procession…passed before the eyes of the old man, and then…he crept out of bed and began to write…”

Sherwood Anderson. Winesburg, Ohio [1919]. A Norton Critical Edition, Edited by Charles E. Modlin and Ray Lewis White. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1996.
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