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

“The Gloom, Doom and Occasional Joy of the Writing Life” by Parul Sehgal in New York Times re John McPhee’s book on writing process of some writers.

 “There are only two kinds of writers in the world, according to John McPhee: the overtly insecure and the covertly insecure,” begins Parul Sehgal’s review of Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, a new book by the eminent writer and teacher of creative nonfiction (1).

But, obviously, the two kinds of writers in the world are the writers of fiction and nonfiction, unless McPhee and Sehgal think that fiction and nonfiction writers have the same kind of writing process.

1. Parul Sehgal. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/books/review-draft-no-4-john-mcphee.html?mcubz=0
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