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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— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Thursday, August 27, 2015

Stephen King’s New York Times essay asks “Can a Novelist Be Too Productive?” But he should discuss “all the clamoring voices” in his head, etc.

He says, “This is not a roundabout way of justifying my own prolificacy…I can say, with complete honesty, that I never had any choice…There were days—I’m not kidding about this, or exaggerating—when I thought all the clamoring voices in my mind would drive me insane.”

My post of June 29, 2015, titled…

Stephen King quoted on Writing: His voices, visions, trances; his becoming or observing autonomous characters; his cowriter muse and discovered stories

…raises the issues he should be addressing.

I addressed prolificacy in my post of July 22, 2014—contrasting Geoges Simenon and William Faulkner—but I’m sure King could say more about it.
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