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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Friday, April 5, 2019


Muse: alternate personality who is first one to know what comes next

In discussions of fiction writing, the word “muse” is used in three ways: 1. a real person who helps the writer, 2. a mythical goddess of artistic inspiration, and 3. an internal, alternate personality, sometimes visualized, often heard, or just vaguely thought of as “the unconscious,” who knows what comes next before the rest of the writer’s mind knows, and who may act as an advisor.

How does the muse know? Either the muse has prewritten the story or has gotten it from other alternate personalities. I don’t know how they do it. It’s just a fact that some alternate personalities are mythopoetic. They like to make up stories, often from things the person has experienced or heard about, but which the host and most other personalities may have forgotten or dismissed.

This is what is behind it when fiction writers say their stories and characters “come to them” or that “the book writes itself” (except for the pruning and rewriting, which may be a lot of work).

Search “mythopoetic” to read a post on the mythopoetic function of alternate personalities.
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