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, May 25, 2025

“Multiple Motives” (post 2) by Kassandra Lamb: Creatively, Subjectively Honest, Author’s Notes

I did keep reading this book, until I peeked at the back, and found a section of “Author’s Notes” (1, pp. 275-277), which included the following:

“Also, apologies to the Baltimore County Police Department for the fictional Detective Philips. I tried very hard to make him a more balanced human being, with some good as well as bad in him. But characters sometimes have a will of their own, and no matter what I did, he refused to be anything but obnoxious” (1, p. 277).


Comment: Psychologically, characters that have a will of their own are alternate personalities. And it was after reading many author interviews in which authors had made this same kind of “joke” that I finally realized, in a very real sense, subjectively, they were not joking—this was their creative experience. And as the old saying goes: “Truth is often spoken in jest.”


1. Kassandra Lamb. Multiple Motives. misterio press, 2011.

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