Multiple Identity Theory is easy to prove true or false: Ask people simple screening questions for multiple personality, and interview your own voices.

Multiple Identity Theory—the idea that ninety percent of novelists, and thirty percent of the general public, have a normal version of multiple personality (normal in that it does not cause distress or dysfunction, and may even be an asset)—is easy to prove true or false.

Screening Questions

Casually, routinely, ask people—acquaintances, friends, students, whomever—if they ever have memory gaps or if things ever happen that nobody else could have done, but they don’t remember doing it.

If you ask such screening questions of people in the general public, most will promptly answer “No,” and that is that. Occasionally you will get a false positive answer from someone who is trying to be helpful, but when you ask them what they mean, it will be clear that they are only talking about normal forgetting.

But if you ask these screening questions neutrally—that is, without any implication that the person will get extra credit for answering yes, and without any insinuation that they would have to be crazy or impaired to acknowledge it—sooner or later you will get a true positive answer. When you ask what they mean, it will be clear that it is not just normal forgetting and that they don’t have any medical condition to otherwise explain it.

Search “memory gaps” and “mental status” for past posts on the implications.

Interview Your Voices

If you are a novelist, you may know that you have had memory gaps or that occasionally things happen that nobody else could have done, but you don’t remember doing it. But since you hear voices—of characters, narrators, muses, etc.—I propose that you interview them.

If you have listened to, or conversed with, your voices only in the context of writing, you may assume that they are nothing more than a feature of your creative process. But have you ever asked them if that is all they are and all they know?