Novelists' Multiple Personality TRAIT: Key to Creativity

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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Sunday, February 26, 2023

Octavia Butler: How did you begin writing?

“Well, I began writing when I was ten and the thing is, I had begun telling myself stories when I was about four so it was almost a natural progression to write them down—eventually. I just got the idea when I was ten to start writing them down because I was forgetting some of them. And I enjoyed it so much I kept doing it” (1, p. 49).

1. Consuela Francis (Editor). Conversations with Octavia Butler. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2010.

2. Wikipedia. “Octavia E. Butler.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_E._Butler

Comment added same day: The above suggests the possible existence of a storytelling alternate personality since age four, plus another personality with memory gaps for the storyteller's stories, plus a writing personality. I suspect that most fiction writers have a group of personalities involved in their creative process.

Novelists' Multiple Personality TRAIT: Key to Creativity

Sunday, February 26, 2023

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