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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Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Novelist Percival Everett, author of 2024 bestseller “James,” is quoted in a published interview on Creating Characters (1), but was contradicted by a study (2)


Q: “Your writing seems to speak to basic human yearnings and the search for the self. Do the individual voices you create try to respond to these yearnings?

PE: “The only reason I’m ever interested in characters in fiction is because they’re searching for something, and in some way anything we’re searching for has to do with self. We’re always trying to find out who we are and what we’re doing.


Q: How do you go about creating each individual voice?

PE: Writers have to be the best actors and become the people we’re writing about…You just have to take the time to become those people…


Q: Some writers say their characters do not surprise them…Do your characters ever inspire or shock you?

PE: Surprise me?…I really don’t believe in this thing that characters take on this life and do what they want to do…I am God. They do what I want, and it’s my world…” (1, pp. 51-52).


Comment: What does he mean by “become those people”? Switching to an alternate, character personality? Furthermore, a study of fifty novelists (2) had found that 90% experienced their characters as having independent agency: minds of their own (like alternate personalities).


1. Forrest Anderson. “Teaching Voice and Creating Meaning: An Interview with Percival Everett." In Conversations with Percival Everett, Edited by Joe Weixlmann, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2013.

2. Marjorie Taylor, Sara D. Hodges, Adèle Kohányi. “The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do Adult Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own?” Imagination, Cognition and Personality, Vol. 22(4) 361-380, 2002-2003. https://pages.uoregon.edu/hodgeslab/files/Download/Taylor%20Hodges%20Kohanyi_2003.pdf

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