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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Friday, June 12, 2015

Novelists, Literary Critics, Readers of Novels: Please add your own comments to this exciting blog about novelists and their multiple personalities…

90% of novelists and 30% of the general public have a normal version of multiple personality. Novelists use their multiple personality in their writing process; for example, having characters with minds of their own. A novelist may also have alternate narrator personalities who attend to different aspects of their writing process or to different genres (sometimes under pseudonyms).

A novelist’s alternate personalities, including ones who are not directly related to writing, may also participate in the novelist’s everyday life, but this is usually covert: When alternate personalities come out, they do so either incognito or camouflaged, under the guise of nicknames, pseudonyms, pursuing a special interest, socializing with a different circle of friends, drinking or drugs, or being in a particular mood.

It may be difficult for the novelist and people who know them to realize this is going on, because the novelist’s regular “host” personality may have memory gaps for some of their alternate personalities, while people who know the novelist may mistake, and shrug off, alternate personalities as just personal quirks, odd moods, “absent-mindedness”—search “absent-mindedness” for a post on Mark Twain—or just typical behavior for a creative artist.

But if, at such times, you asked the novelist, not as a criticism, but with empathy and in all seriousness, “Who are you?” you might find out (if the alternate personality trusted you sufficiently).

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