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, April 28, 2021

“The Dark Half” (post 6) by Stephen King (post 15): Why is this story’s protagonist a novelist?


In the end, the good guy, Thad Beaumont, a novelist, defeats his evil, incarnated pseudonym, George Stark. At Thad’s prompting, thousands of birds kill George. “It’s like something out that Daphne du Maurier story" (1, p. 465), which also inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, “The Birds.”


Stephen King could have written this kind of story with a protagonist who was not a novelist. It is not only novelists who might have a dark side. So why did he make Thad a novelist? He wanted to say that novelists are more likely to have another side that seems to be autonomous; that is, an alternate personality.


King was right (2, 3).


1. Stephen King. The Dark Half [1989]. New York, Gallery Books, 2018.

2. Marjorie Taylor PhD, et al. The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do Adult Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own? Imagination, Cognition and Personality, Vol 22(4) 361-380, 2002-2003. https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/7/8783/files/2014/07/TaylorHodgesKohanyi-130mpe0.pdf

3. John Foxwell, Ben Alderson-Day, Charles Fernyhough, Angela Woods. ‘I’ve learned to treat my characters as people’: Varieties of agency and interaction in Writers’ experiences of their Characters’ Voices. Consciousness and Cognition, Volume 79, March 2020. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810019304155 

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to comment (whether you agree or disagree) and ask questions (simple or expert). I appreciate your contribution.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)