E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel: Characters are Alternate Personalities, who “arrive,” “mutiny,” “run away,” “get out of hand,” take “revenge”

“The characters arrive when evoked, but full of the spirit of mutiny. For they have these numerous parallels with people like ourselves, they try to live their own lives and are consequently often engaged in treason against the main scheme of the book. They ‘run away’, they ‘get out of hand’; they are creations inside a creation, and often inharmonious towards it; if they are given complete freedom they kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check they revenge themselves…” (1, p. 64).

I have previously quoted other novelists who have said the same things. That is the way novelists think, but you wouldn’t know it from any of the standard literary theories, or from taking any standard college course on literature or psychology.

“Characters arrive when evoked” means that they seem to come of their own accord when writers put themselves in their writing frame of mind, which Stephen King and Doris Lessing have described as trance or self-hypnosis.

Characters seem to have minds of their own, which is what is meant by the term “alternate personality.” As in multiple personality, writers may hear the voices of their characters in their head. And writers may sometimes even experience their characters as coming out.

But since the above does not cause the writer distress or dysfunction—on the contrary, it is part of a productive, creative process—it is normal multiple personality, not multiple personality disorder. Indeed, fiction writing may be therapeutic, and help keep the former from becoming the latter.

E. M. Forster. Aspects of the Novel [1927]. London, Hodder & Stroughton, 2012.