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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Wednesday, October 12, 2022

“Plum Island” by Nelson DeMille (post 2): The reason some words in the protagonist’s head are rendered in italics, but other words are not


“I was at a point when I almost had to cross my legs lest Ms. Whitestone notice that Lord Pudly was stirring from his nap. Keep your pee-pee in the teepee” (1, p. 338).


“…She laughed. She wiggled her toes again and crossed her legs again. My goodness” (1, p 346).


Comment: “Keep your pee-pee in the teepee” is in italics, but “My goodness” is not, because the former is a remark by the protagonist’s alternate personality, but the latter is merely a thought of the protagonist’s regular, host personality, and the use of italics is the way that many authors make that distinction.


1. Nelson DeMille. Plum Island. NewYork, Grand Central Publishing, 1997/2017. 

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