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.

Saturday, November 5, 2022

Eudora Welty (post 3): What she calls a writer’s “imagination,” other novelists have called “impersonation,” a talent of multiple personality


“I have been told, both in approval and accusation, that I seem to love all my characters. What I do in writing any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself…the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer’s imagination that I set most high” (1, p. xvii).


Comment: What Welty calls a writer’s “imagination,” other novelists have more accurately called a writer’s “impersonation.” And what she calls “the jump” is her switch to an alternate personality.


Please search “impersonation” for past posts that quote other novelists on this issue.


1. Eudora Welty. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. New York, Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1980/2019. 

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)