from Preface to “Six Characters in Search of an Author” by Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello (post 2): On Creative Process and Multiple Personality.

“Many years ago…a nimble little handmaid entered the service of my art…Her name is Fantasy. She is a bit of a joker and somewhat malicious and, though she likes to dress in black, it cannot be denied that she is often downright bizarre…And she amuses herself by bringing home the most discontented folk in the world for me to draw stories, novels, and plays out of them…

“Well now, several years ago, this handmaid Fantasy had the unfortunate inspiration or ill-omened whim to bring home a whole family…the six characters who are seen coming onto the stage at the beginning of the play…

“What author can ever say how or why a given character is born in his fantasy?…I can only say that, without having consciously looked for them, I found them there before me, so alive that they could be touched, so alive that I could even hear them breathe…Born alive, they wished to live…So much so that, when I persisted in my determination to drive them from my mind, they continued to live on their own account…like characters from a novel, escaped by some miracle from the pages of the book that contained them. They chose certain moments of the day to reappear before me in the solitude of my study…

“ ‘Now why,’ I said to myself, ‘why don’t I represent this extraordinary situation of an author who refuses to give life to some of his characters, and the situation of those characters who, born of his fantasy and already infused with life, cannot resign themselves to exclusion from the world of art? They have already detached themselves from me, have their own life, have acquired voice and movement; on their own, therefore, in this struggle for life that they have had to wage against me, they have already become dramatic characters, characters who can move and speak on their own; they already see themselves as such; they have learned to defend themselves from me; they will also know how to defend themselves from others. Well then, let them go where dramatic characters usually go to have life—on a stage. And let them see how it turns out.’ That is what I did…

“Without wishing it, without knowing it, in the strife of their troubled souls, each one of them defends himself against the accusations of the others by expressing, as his own living passion and torment, the same pangs that I myself have suffered over so many years: the illusion of mutual understanding, irremediably based on the empty abstraction of words; the multiple personality of every individual…”

Pirandello exaggerates when he says that everyone has multiple personality. About 1.5% of the general public has the mental disorder (according to DSM-5), while about 90% of fiction writers and perhaps 30% of the general public have a normal version (according to this blog).

Luigi Pirandello. “Preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author” (1925), pages 186-196, in Luigi Pirandello Three Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author [1921], Henry IV, The Mountain Giants. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Anthony Mortimer. New York, Oxford University Press, 2014.