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.

— Share site with friends.

MPD Textbooks: — Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) (a.k.a. Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), New York, The Guilford Press, 1989. —James G. Friesen, PhD. Uncovering the Mystery of MPD, (includes discussion of demonic possession) Eugene, Oregon, Wipf and Stock Publishers,1997.

Wednesday, February 24, 2021

Isaac Asimov (post 1): Author of five hundred (500) fiction and nonfiction books, including many award-winners, discusses his writing process


“I don’t write only when I’m writing. Whenever I’m away from my typewriter—eating, falling asleep, performing my ablutions—my mind keeps working. On occasion, I can hear bits of dialogue running through my thoughts, or passages of exposition. Usually it deals with whatever I am writing or am about to write. Even when I don’t hear the actual words, I know that my mind is working on it unconsciously.


[It is “unconscious” only from the point of view of his regular personality. Obviously, there is some kind of intelligent consciousness (an alternate personality) producing the dialogue and the passages of exposition.]


“That’s why I’m always ready to write. Everything is, in a sense, already written. I can just sit down and type it all out, at up to a hundred words a minute, at my mind’s dictation. Furthermore, I can be interrupted and it doesn’t affect me. After the interruption, I simply return to the business at hand and continue typing under mental dictation.


“It means, of course, that what enters your mind must stay in your mind. I always take that for granted, so that I never make notes…


“Even the most complicated plot, or the most intricate exposition, comes out properly, with everything in the right order…but I don’t know how I do it. I simply have the knack and had it even as a kid…


“…how have I avoided writer’s block, considering that I never stop? If I were engaged in only one writing project at a time I suppose I wouldn’t avoid it. Frequently, when I am at work on a science fiction novel (the hardest to do of all the different things I write) I find myself heartily sick of it and unable to write another word. But I don’t let that drive me crazy. I don’t stare at blank sheets of paper. I don’t spend days and nights cudgeling a head that is empty of ideas.


“Instead, I simply leave the novel and go on to any of the dozen other projects that are on tap. I write an editorial, or an essay, or a short story, or work on one of my nonfiction books. By the time I’ve grown tired of these things, my mind [by virtue of his alternate personality] has been able to do its proper work and fill up again. I return to my novel and find myself [his regular personality] able to write easily once more" (1, pp. 203-210).


1. Isaac Asimov. I. Asimov: A Memoir. New York, Bantam/Doubleday, 1994.

2. Wikipedia. Isaac Asimov. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov

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