Fiction Writing: In today’s New York Times Sunday Review, Ben Dolnick says it is like doing a puzzle that someone else has already created. Who?

“Toward the end of a puzzle, there’s a moment when you shift from being the puzzlemaker’s adversary to being her admirer, even her accomplice. The human intelligence on the other side of the page begins to come clear…

“In fiction writing you are of course both the maker and the solver, but the sense of discovery — the feeling that whole sublayers of structure and theme have been created by a stranger with your pleasure in mind — is no less acute.”

Others have spoken of the Muse, Voice, Alter Ego, or Shadow. Mark Twain might have called it Mysterious Stranger (the title of his last novel). I call it Alternate Personality.