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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Monday, April 12, 2021

Metaphors: Subjectively experienced by fiction writers and poets


August 3, 2015

Subjectively Experienced Metaphors (SEMs): Rather than being analogies, some metaphors are subjective experiences; e.g., synesthesia or multiple personality


Most people think of metaphors as analogies or connections between previously unrelated things, which may be true for most metaphors. However, some metaphors may reflect actual subjective experiences.


One such type of metaphor, synesthetic metaphors, may reflect the writer’s synesthesia. For an outline of the types of synesthesia—actual subjective experiences on which certain metaphors could be based—see Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia.


Another category of metaphor is personification. An example would be to attribute a human voice, with a mind of its own, to a fictional character, as when a novelist, in an interview, says, “When I heard the character’s voice, and the character came alive to me, I knew I had a novel.”


That is usually considered metaphorical, since “everyone knows” that characters don’t really exist or have voices or minds of their own that the novelist actually hears. But what if novelists say they actually do hear a voice in their head? And what if, according to novelists, the voice says things that the novelist hadn’t thought of? If novelists actually do have those subjective experiences, is what they say in interviews a metaphor?


(As readers of this blog know, I consider autonomous characters with minds of their own to be equivalent to alternate personalities in multiple personality.)


Well, in one sense it is a metaphor, but in another sense it isn’t. It is a metaphor, because characters don’t really exist. It is not a metaphor, because novelists honestly feel that they are reporting an experience.


The only name for this that I’ve thought of is: Subjectively Experienced Metaphors (SEMs). Maybe you can think of a better name. Or maybe there already is a name for this that I haven’t heard.

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Search “metaphors” for further discussion related to various writers. 

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