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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Thursday, May 23, 2024

“The Incendiaries” by R. O. Kwon: Author’s Addendum on Writing

“The people I know best continue to surprise me with the multiverses they contain”…In fiction, as much as I can, I hope to do justice to that complexity (1, p. 217)…


“More than anything, though, what helped was the day-to-day act of writing itself. Of getting to engage seriously, often desperately, with the English language. Words, words, words! I love the shape of words. I love the roll and crunch of syllables in my mouth. Most of the time writing’s so fucking hard. But in the rare, astonishing moments when the writing’s really going well, when I’m so deep in it that I forget I have an I, there’s nothing like it. (As Goethe said: ‘The songs made me, not I them’). It’s the purest joy I know” (1, p. 223).


Comment: She contains a “multiverse” in which, at times, when writing’s really going well, she joyfully forgets her own “I,” her own regular personality, and the novel seems to write itself.


Added same day: I then began reading the novel, but it was hard to follow, so I put it aside.


1. R. O. Kwon. The Incendiaries. New York, Riverhead Books, 2018.

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