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, April 30, 2017

Dashiell Hammett (post 4, update): Why did he have writer’s block for the last decades of his life? Why did he fail in his attempt to write literary novels?

I’m up to page 141 in The Dain Curse. The protagonist, who is a detective, says to another character, who is a writer:

“Don’t be literary with me, building up to climaxes and the like. I’m too crude for that—it’d only give me a bellyache. Just spread it out for me.

“ ‘You’ll always be what you are,’ he [the writer] said.”

 I don’t think this dialogue proves my speculation as to why Hammett had writer’s block when he tried to write more literary novels; however, in the context of my speculation in yesterday’s post about “artistic differences” between personalities, I do find it funny.
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