E. L. Doctorow on Writing (post 2): a “mysterious" process in which “characters do the writing” for a “repertory company” of alternate personalities.

“It’s hard for me to isolate my own motives and feelings. I can tell you that I started to write the book [The Book of Daniel] in the third person…And after one hundred fifty pages I was terribly bored. That was a moment of great despair in my life…That moment, when I threw out those pages and hit bottom, was when I became reckless enough to find the voice of the book, which was Daniel…and it turned out Daniel was talking…I don’t know why that happened or how it happened, but that is the experience I had in composing the book. I don’t know if it’s possible for a writer really, truthfully to describe as a conscious decision a process that is really mysterious to him and largely irrational” (1, p. 46).

“There are always characters in the books who do the writing. I like to create the artist and let the artist do the work” (1, p. 95).

“The experience of writing is not a particularly intellectual experience. You don’t know what you know. You don’t know anything when you write. You work inductively from the text that you happen to produce, and when you see what you don’t want or can’t use, you begin to dimly see what you need. And you don’t consciously learn all that much as you write, because each book is so specific and precise in its being that it basically gives you very little instruction that you can take away from it” (1, p. 173).

“One of the things I’ve found myself realizing is almost the sense that I have a repertory company of characters, and I keep changing their costumes and their looks, and maybe even altering their relationships. But they’re my company of players and they play different roles, but they’re beginning to appear to me as my loyal troop” (1, p. 196).

What Doctorow calls “a repertory company of characters,” who “do the writing” and play the roles, I would call alternate personalities.

1. Christopher D. Morris (Editor). Conversations with E. L. Doctorow. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1999.