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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Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Interviewing novelists on the art of fiction: When novelists say they converse with characters, why do interviewers rarely pursue the issue?

In past posts, I have criticized interviewers as having no curiosity or being incompetent. But another possibility is that interviewers are afraid.

There is an old joke that neurotics build castles in the air, while psychotics live in them (and psychiatrists collect the rent). The interviewer may feel that a novelist’s conversing with characters as though they were real people is psychotic. And the interviewer may be afraid to challenge a person who may be psychotic.

Why, then, do novelists volunteer such information about their creative process? Novelists, themselves, may wonder if they are crazy. So if they say such things in published interviews, but nobody accuses them of being crazy, they feel reassured.

Of course, I see the fiction writer’s characters who converse with them as being equivalent to alternate personalities, and I don’t see multiple personality trait as psychotic—besides, most psychotics are not violent—so I would not be afraid of pursuing the issue.
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