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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Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Will Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, or any other novelist, ever describe, in depth and detail, how fiction writing is actually done?

My June 29, 2015 post quotes Stephen King on writing, from his book On Writing (2000) and other sources. Those quotations get to the heart of fiction writing. But King never actually discusses these things in any depth or detail. And neither have any other novelists.

The reason that novelists never discuss their creative process in any depth or detail is that the part of the novelist’s mind that is speaking about writing is not the only part of the novelist’s mind that is responsible for the writing.

As King’s quotations imply, the part of his mind that wrote On Writing is only one part of his mind, and this one part does not know the whole story of his writing process.

Moreover, the novelist’s regular “host” personality may be afraid of knowing too much about the writing process. Like Adam and Eve, they may fear that eating from the tree of knowledge might get them kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

However, they needn’t worry. The hidden parts of their mind—once assured that they will not be banished—would be only too happy to tell their story.
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