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.

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Wednesday, February 24, 2021

Isaac Asimov (post 1): Author of five hundred (500) fiction and nonfiction books, including many award-winners, discusses his writing process


“I don’t write only when I’m writing. Whenever I’m away from my typewriter—eating, falling asleep, performing my ablutions—my mind keeps working. On occasion, I can hear bits of dialogue running through my thoughts, or passages of exposition. Usually it deals with whatever I am writing or am about to write. Even when I don’t hear the actual words, I know that my mind is working on it unconsciously.


[It is “unconscious” only from the point of view of his regular personality. Obviously, there is some kind of intelligent consciousness (an alternate personality) producing the dialogue and the passages of exposition.]


“That’s why I’m always ready to write. Everything is, in a sense, already written. I can just sit down and type it all out, at up to a hundred words a minute, at my mind’s dictation. Furthermore, I can be interrupted and it doesn’t affect me. After the interruption, I simply return to the business at hand and continue typing under mental dictation.


“It means, of course, that what enters your mind must stay in your mind. I always take that for granted, so that I never make notes…


“Even the most complicated plot, or the most intricate exposition, comes out properly, with everything in the right order…but I don’t know how I do it. I simply have the knack and had it even as a kid…


“…how have I avoided writer’s block, considering that I never stop? If I were engaged in only one writing project at a time I suppose I wouldn’t avoid it. Frequently, when I am at work on a science fiction novel (the hardest to do of all the different things I write) I find myself heartily sick of it and unable to write another word. But I don’t let that drive me crazy. I don’t stare at blank sheets of paper. I don’t spend days and nights cudgeling a head that is empty of ideas.


“Instead, I simply leave the novel and go on to any of the dozen other projects that are on tap. I write an editorial, or an essay, or a short story, or work on one of my nonfiction books. By the time I’ve grown tired of these things, my mind [by virtue of his alternate personality] has been able to do its proper work and fill up again. I return to my novel and find myself [his regular personality] able to write easily once more" (1, pp. 203-210).


1. Isaac Asimov. I. Asimov: A Memoir. New York, Bantam/Doubleday, 1994.

2. Wikipedia. Isaac Asimov. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov

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