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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— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Louisa May Alcott (post 12): Alcott says stories “grow as they will” and are provided by character alternate personalities; then she transcribes it for publication.

Alcott describes a writing process similar to that described in past posts by Mark Twain and Edward Albee. Twain would wait for his creative, alternate personality to “fill the tank,” and then Twain would take the story from the tank and transcribe it for publication. Albee said that his plays were prewritten for him.

“My methods of work are very simple…My head is my study, & there I keep the various plans of stories for years sometimes, letting them grow as they will till I am ready to put them on paper.

“Then it is quick work, as chapters go down word for word & no need for alteration…

“While a story is underway I live in it, see the people, more plainly than real ones, round me, hear them talk, & am much interested, surprized or provoked at their actions, for I seem to have no power to rule them, & can simply record their experiences & performances” (1, p. 320).

The difference between constructed characters and character alternate personalities is that the latter are experienced by the author as more real than real, and as having minds of their own.

1. Madeleine B. Stern. Louisa May Alcott: A Biography. Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1996/1999.
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