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, October 29, 2023

“Hidden” (post 1) by Fern Michaels: “a voice in his head shouted STOP!”

“If Gaines had learned one thing in his years of law enforcement, it was always to trust his gut…He was supposed to go down the side of a particular pier, but a voice in his head shouted, STOP!  He ducked around a corner and pulled out his weapon…had he not listened to that voice in his head, he would have been the one lying in a pool of blood…” (1, p. 58).


Comment: Since the thesis of this blog is that most novelists have multiple personality trait, I would guess that whenever this author almost makes a mistake while writing one of her novels, the voice of a literary alternate personality in her head shouts STOP!


1. Fern Michaels. Hidden. New York, Zebra Books, 2021.

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