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.

— Share site with friends.

Wednesday, December 25, 2019


from March 4, 2015
All literary theories—except Multiple Identity Literary Theory—assume that novelists create what most people can’t create, but do not think differently

Standard literary theories are approaches to the interpretation of literary text. They are not theories about how literature is done. Their tacit assumption is that the novelist’s mind works, basically, the same way that everyone else’s mind does.

Most literary theorists allow that certain proclivities and experiences might inspire, enhance, and influence literary creativity—e.g., trauma, depression, gender, childhood, culture, socio-economic conditions, imagination—but they do not believe that the way novelists think is essentially different... 

Multiple Identity Literary Theory, the theory of this blog, is the only literary theory that addresses how novelists think (which sometimes helps you to understand what they wrote).
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