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.

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Friday, November 11, 2022

“How Novels Work” by John Mullan: Mistakenly thinks “authors create their characters, and can know whatever they want to know about them”

“Logically speaking, [Professor Mullan says], all authors of novels are omniscient: their characters are their creations, so they can surely know whatever they want to know” (1, p. 64).


But “Henry James, for instance, frequently speaks in his novels to indicate that he cannot know everything about his characters” (1, p 65).


The reason, Mark Twain and other novelists have said (search “Mark Twain”), is that author’s do not “create” their major characters. 


As psychologist Marjorie Taylor found in a study of fifty fiction writers, ninety percent of novelists experience their characters as having “minds of their own” and “independent agency” (2).


1. John Mullan. How Novels Work. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006.

2. Marjorie Taylor, 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, number 4, 2002-2003. https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/7/8783/files/2014/07/TaylorHodgesKohanyi-130mpe0.pdf

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