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 1, 2022

“Conversations with Jim Harrison”: His mysterious fiction writing process

“While you’re working you totally enter the other person" (1, p. 114).


“…It was a nightmare for me because The Road Home is a voice novel, so the first two hundred pages are completely in the voice of the elderly John Wesley Northridge II, so I had to become seventy-one myself” (1, p. 146).


“…I don’t think I’ve ever written any fiction I haven’t thought about for three or four years…But I know the story before I sit down…I wrote Legends in nine days…but that’s the only time it ever happened like that…I couldn’t stop once I got started. It was truly like taking dictation…But that illusion of taking dictation from wherever always makes you wonder what’s going on, what can this be?…Suddenly the voice is in a perfectly energized marriage with the language and sensibility…I don’t know quite where those gifts come from. I’ve always felt that you shouldn’t over-inquire about the goose that lays the golden egg” (1, pp. 146-147).


“…And since I have one eye [the other eye was blinded in an accident]…I start more from my senses quite often than my mind and so I actually see what I’m going to do. For instance, my problem with the film version of “Legends” was that I’d already seen it in my mind, so there wasn’t quite enough dirt and blood rubbed into it. It wasn’t gritty enough. It got too pretty…” (1, p. 147).


Interviewer: Are there things that you don’t know about your characters?

Jim Harrison: Oh absolutely…I’m not all my characters. How could I be all two hundred or three hundred of them? These are people of their own…A lot of the novel-writing art is conscious, but it’s the emergence of the characters that are sometimes like seizures, even coming out of a dream…In another sense, what keeps me writing is the mystery of human personality…there’s really no accounting for a great deal of it…” (1, p. 150).


1. Robert DeMott (Editor). Conversations with Jim Harrison (Literary Conversations Series). Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2019.

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