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.

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Thursday, January 4, 2024

“Slow Horses” (post 2) by Mick Herron: Does Herron hope “not to be found out,” because his writing is not as good as people think, or because he feels like he really didn’t create it?


In Mike Herron’s new Preface to the tenth anniversary edition of Slow Horses, he says, “A writer spends the first part of his or her career hoping to be discovered; the rest hoping not to be found out” (1, p. XIII).


Comment: Many novelists may feel like Charles Dickens, who told his biographer that he knew he created his characters, but didn’t feel like he created them, because he heard them speak their mind and wrote down what they said. Search “Dickens” in this blog.


1. Mick Herron. Slow Horses. New York, Soho Press, 2010/2020. 

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