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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Monday, December 3, 2018


Susan Sontag: Finds her fictional characters when she hears their voices; Has two personalities, one who writes and another who speaks to friends

Q: Could you talk a little bit about creating a character? About how the characters in your stories come into being?
Sontag: …I hear a sentence in my head, and then wonder, “Who’s saying this?”…It’s always a voice…The other day I heard a sentence, which I wrote down, and I know it’s the beginning of a story. (1, p. 226).

“Every time I say ‘I,’ I feel it’s a fiction. Of course the ‘I’ has some connection with me—I don’t want to present a schizophrenic [she means multiple personality] account of what I do. But the I that can say ‘I’ in print is not the same I that speaks to my friends, that leads a life” (1, p. 198).

Other fiction writers have said the same thing.

1. Susan Sontag. Conversations with Susan Sontag. Edited by Leland Poague. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1995.
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