WRITING: MPD

In no way do I intend to discredit or denigrate the seriousness of the malady referred to as MPD or Multiple Personality Disorder, as I find it a fascinating topic of research of the mind.  But since it came up recently in Alias Grace, it likely has affected my current thinking on writing character and so I toss out an observation here that relates to my own problems of authorly narrative.

Obviously I have not done much reading in the last couple of days, being consumed as is my wont by writing Tim Dawson.  Unfortunately, I also have not wrapped the few gifts I have to ship them to Spain and D.C. before Christmas, nor written the cards.

With tremendous effort, I have tried to take myself out of the writing of story, but am not quite managing the concept.  Rather, I seem instead to slip into the character, thus still making it me, but with the difference of situation, environment, hopefully voice and reaction.  This doesn’t cut it.

This acknowledgement brings up the theory of writers being able to slip into these different characters of their story, and in effect, may indeed be simply an acceptable form of multiple personality with the added awareness that is not found in the reality of this mental disorder. We are using shared experience and knowledge but creating a character more able to cope with a given conflict than we ourselves may ever find ourselves involved in.  So if we write about a character living in Peru, never having been there, we may still find the character speaking just as we might, or similar, but in Peruvian (or whatever they speak). 

The goal, I think, is to achieve a totally unrelated character, even someone we can’t comprehend because the thinking is so different than our own.  This, well…it’s so hard!  To sit there typing a story as if looking over someone else’s shoulder.  I cannot seem to do this.  I know and am very aware of my own different personalities–as friend, as student, as shopkeeper, as wife–and they are similar, but have different sets of reactive devices installed with the titles.  I need to draw from a wider circle of weirdos beyond these I know intimately.  I need to write something and then read it and say, "Holy shit, why did he do that?"

Just one of many quirks and questions that face the troubled writer. Perhaps the better solution would be to create a writing exercise–and that’s all these stories are turning out to be–that plunks the character into the known environment, this town, my house, etc. even my physical body if necessary, and concentrate the difference in the character rather than merely sticking myself into some foreign situation and sporting a Barbie-doll figure.