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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Sunday, January 17, 2016

Why are aspiring fiction writers cautioned to maintain a consistent point of view? What would cause anyone to write with an inconsistent point of view?

If people who did not have multiple personality were to try to write novels, they would not have any problem in maintaining a consistent point of view. Since they have only one personality, they have only one point of view. All narration and every character's thoughts come from that same, single source.

In contrast, aspiring novelists who have multiple personality will have two ways to make the mistake of an inconsistent point of view.

First, first-person speakers, if aware that they have alternate personalities, may inadvertently reveal that awareness by slipping from “I” to “we.”

Second, the characters, who, like alternate personalities, have minds of their own—their own, independent, points of view—may get away from the writer personality, and insist on expressing their own points of view, even when it is inconsistent to do so. As Toni Morrison said, you have to control your characters and remind them whose novel it is.
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