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.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

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

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Monday, December 24, 2018


“Mrs Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf (post 12): To understand how this author wrote “stream of consciousness,” you have to remember who she was

The characters of this novel have “stream of consciousness.” But what is the process by which an author writes that way?

Does the author continually ask herself what this kind of person would think, feel, and say under these circumstances? Well, that’s what I would do, but I’m not a real novelist, and that’s not how real novelists do it.

Virginia Woolf would write stream of consciousness by switching personalities. She would switch to the personality of a particular character, and as that person, say what came into her mind.

I infer that Virginia Woolf would do it that way from who she was: She was the author of Orlando and The Waves, two intensely multiple personality revelations.
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