Novelists' Multiple Personality TRAIT: Key to Creativity: December 2021

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.

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Thursday, December 23, 2021

Why don’t most great fiction writers boast?

Because, as Charles Dickens said, “I don’t invent it.”

Because, as Mark Twain said, “Writers don’t create characters.”

Because, as Stephen King said, his stories are “found objects.”

Because most fiction writers experience their works as

coming TO them, not FROM them.

Where do fiction writers come from?

They self-select themselves from the approximately 30% of the population with multiple personality trait. These people, as Walt Whitman said, “contain multitudes.”

Indeed, most fiction writers can’t analyze their own works because their works are written by multiple narrative personalities.