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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Friday, June 29, 2018

“Self-Blurbing” by Author’s Pseudonym: Publisher and friends probably think it a joke, but alternate personalities may sincerely appreciate each other

Self-Blurbing
To the Editor:
Michael Ondaatje’s wonderful story (By the Book, June 17) about the “self-blurb” the crime novelist Donald Westlake gave his own book, written under his Richard Stark pseudonym, “I wish I had written this book,” is not unique. In 1955, Evan Hunter published “Murder in the Navy” under his Richard Marsten pseudonym with this self-blurb: “‘Superb Suspense!’ says Evan Hunter, author of ‘The Blackboard Jungle’”…
Richard Dannay
New York

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