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.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Sunday, April 28, 2024

“Whisper of Warning” by Laura Griffin: Italicized alternate personality states key fact at top of page, the protagonist not till the bottom 


“I [the bartender] haven’t seen him around lately…Her either…


“That’s because they’re dead.” [italicized voice in protagonist’s head]


“How had she [Courtney] sat here, in this very bar, and not realized she was being played by a cheap-tipping lawyer in a three-thousand-dollar suit? Just thinking about it made her chest burn. And then all that burning anger was replaced with fear as she glanced around the bar and realized two of the people who used to come here were dead now” (1, pp. 153-154).


Comment: Search “italicized” in this blog for past posts discussing its use by novelists to indicate a voice in the head from an alternate personality, reflecting novelists’ multiple personality trait. But this is the first novel I’ve seen in which the alternate personality makes a point before the character.


1. Laura Griffin. Whisper of Warning. New York, Pocket Star Books, 2009.

2. Wikipedia. “Laura Griffin.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Griffin 

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