Vladimir Nabokov says novels are prewritten; presented to his imagination; he only reproduces them; but he, not characters, controls the reproductive process

“…I always have at the very start a curiously clear preview of the entire novel before me or above me…the entire book, before it is written, seems to be ready ideally in some other, now transparent, now dimming, dimension, and my job is to take down as much of it as I can make out and as precisely as I am humanly able to do. The greatest happiness I experience in composing is when I feel I cannot understand, or rather catch myself not understanding (without the presupposition of an already existing creation) how or why that image or structural move or exact formulation of phrase has just come to me…”

Interviewer: “One often hears from writers talk of how a character takes hold of them and in a sense dictates the course of the action. Has this ever been your experience?”

“I have never experienced this. What a preposterous experience! Writers who have had it must be very minor or insane. No, the design of my novel is fixed in my imagination and every character follows the course I imagine for him. I am the perfect dictator in that private world insofar as I alone am responsible for its stability and truth! Whether I reproduce it as fully and faithfully as I would wish, is another question” (1, pp. 93-94).

[Added 5:40 p.m.] So who did, in some other dimension, so to speak, write the novel in the first place, and provide it in an idealized format to Nabokov's novelist personality? One or more behind-the-scenes alternate personalities.

1. Vladimir Nabokov. Strong Opinions [1973]. London, Penguin Classics, 2012.