A New Twist on 'Making It All Up'

Well we want to write a novel (started it) so I guess we are writers, pretty imaginative and everything always liked telling stories. People probably would think we are making all of this up.

Honestly we haven’t hardly posted anything on this forum because Star is scared silly about writing stuff on here. Anything that can link us to our life in any way is a no to write on here. She thinks that our family will find this somehow and probably would say things like “what are you doing on some crazy website, pretending you have DID or that you’re insane, or making up you’re these other characters, talking to weirdos, what are you doing”. We always think people will think of us as made up, imaginary friends, pretend, overthinking everything. Can’t see a psychologist or anyone so I don’t know what to do.

Hopefully your situation isn’t too difficult.

I think I’ve rambled on long enough so I should probably depart from your thread now, if someone replies to this, I’ll try to reply soon as I can.

Why can’t I figure out when to use we or I, my writing feels so broken here lol.

Been thinking about DID & writing this morning, & we remembered this thread so we dug it up & re-read it again.

The last 3 or 4 days have been kinda wierd here. I started writing a new short story, sequal the the short story I finished a week or 2 ago. So first, something in the story triggered someone inside & we were kinda messed up wednesday night & thursday night. Wednesday wasnt so bad but thursday was sucky. And then we felt sorta sick most of friday, cos of it.

But friday i sorta got the story plotted out? And I realized, I 'write' these storys exactly the same way we used to take minutes at meetings. Like, I see the story play out real-time in my head, and I take alotta notes. Like bullet points, abbreviations, i don't u sually record dialog unless it sounds important or complicated & i might forget.

Then afterwards I go back and expand the notes, add back the dialog, descriptive stuff etc. Thats literally exactly the way we took minutes at important meetings & stuff.

Anyways so with this story, there wre some other wierd things that hit me. First, its like I don't control where it goes? The characters do. I don't control them either. One character came up with a problem & I was stumped. Then anotehr character had a solution. I didn't like it, but it solved hte problem & let the story go forward so thats what we did.

Then there were some big questions that a ccharacter had to answer & I didn't know what would happen. It wasn't till i saw the answers on the screen in my notes, that i knew what had been decided.

It kinda freaks me out about all this, cos like, it reminds me of some of the stuff about denial & alters, like if its just your imagination then you can control them and make them do an say and think what you want. But if they ahve their own opinions and make their own decisions and stuff, you dont control them, and they're alters. And like, that feels like where I'm at with the characters & the story?

Like I don't think they are alters, or I don't wanna think it. I think maybe alters are I dunno, breathing some life into them? And some aspects of the story absolutely triggered the #### outta some of us for a couple days. It stirred up a bunch of questions & maybe brought some trauma memories a little closer to the surface. But nothing in the story is remotely based on real life, its just all fiction.

I dunno. It makes me feel wierd and stuff, but I do wanna keep writing cos its usually fun & distracting. And some folks are enjoying my stories which is nice too.

Viola

Hi Viola,

That intense and I can understand that this might scare you. But it is in some ways also very cool, I think.

I had somewhat similar experiences with writing fiction myself. Some (not all) of my characters and stories have a tendency to be very independent and sometimes I feel more like watching instead of crafting a story.

Partially I explain this experience in the following way. Plural brain seems to have developed a general ability to create identities which act/feel/think independently of each other. Some of these identities got a stronger connection to the body or our life and were probably created by our brain because of intense problems, which were perceived as not possible to solve/escape by other means. These are the ones I would call alters.
There are others who are completely bound into a fictional world inside of our head and maybe even initially created by will. In most cases they stay there and they have no influence on the rest of us. Like... they don't seem to be be interested to use the body and with very few exceptions they don't even interact with anything outside of their world. But they use the same blueprint by which alters were created and therefore can develop independently in their world.

I think, what happens sometime is, this "breathing some life into them" you describe. We have alters who had a strong influence on fictional characters of me, as far as I can tell. Alea for example was also the name of a fictional character with very similar character traits, before I knew that Alea existed as an alter. Their life is very different though, since Alter-Alea identifies with our outside life and Fictional-Alea lifes in a cyberpunk world. Still... Fictional Alea shares his body too with other identities too

And there are some mixed case like Fae, who lives in his own fictional fantasy world with a lot of stories going on, but his own story has connection to our outside life (in a complicated way which I still can't grasp completely, because of some inception-like dream-in-a-dream layers) and he has some interest into the outside life too.

Short version, before it gets too weird: I think that human brains are capable of a lot of weird stuff and there isn't a final answer to the question, if fictional characters with a lot of agency on their own, are actually also alters.

I wouldn't be too scared. If the are and are interested in your outside life they will say hello at some point, I guess. But maybe they are just happy to life in their own world.
If writing is something you like, please don't stop it!

- Autumn

Hey thanks Autumn!

Thats a really good take on it, DID brains being good at having other selves that can act and think on their own, so it makes sense if we're focusing on some stories that characters in the stories could become like more 'real'.

Em was around this afternoon & she reminded me too, even tho I'm only just starting to write stuff, our system has had a lot of experience with stories for a long time. We just never bothered writing them before.

I also completely forgot, but we've had characters in stories that were based on alters (before we knew we were plural) and we've had alters who actually did sorta originate in a story & then became a 'normal' alter. And we had a 'normal' alter retreat into a story.

Its kinda freaky how much of this stuff goes on in our head, and how easy it is for us to forget all that stuff at times too.

I dunno if I had a point to this, my mind just went blank lol.

Anyways... didn't actually do any writing today I think, but I did sorta watch and listen as a couple of the characters sat down & talked about the events of the story I'm working on. I didn't take notes or whatever, like it didn't feel like part of the story? It just felt like, 2 friends talking about a little adventure they'd both just had together, that I happened to be able to see & hear. No idea what to even make of that, lol.

Viola

Hi

Kit lives in fantasy, in fact we found this board when she came across it researching Maladaptive Daydreaming and found an old post on here. She never writes the stories down though.

Maddie went through a phase writing short stories after our old dog died about how the dog would reincarnate and find her way home to us like in the movie 'A Dog's Purpose' and we'd be a complete family again.

An autobiography was started with several alters adding to it what they could remember from each part of the bodies entire life,though it kind of half way through ended up as a journal with entries about specific days when something had annoyed or upset whoever was out. Reading it back it's completely disjointed and apart from the beginning (that started off ok), it's hard to work out who wrote what some days, so we might delete that so it's never found.

It's served it's purpose in a way, we now understand we are a multiple system and the probable causes and points where new alters came along and why and how the autism could have caused it. I suspect even with many alters fronting our host could not cope with being a 'celebrity' in the extremely rare event the 'book' was published and became very famous! ..certainly not in this age of intense social media and public's total lack of respect for a person's privacy!

Sioux

Hey Sioux,

Thats pretty neat about the autobiography! Our memory's so mixed up we couldn't even try something like that lol.

I still haven't been able to do any more writing yet. Tried a couple times over the weekend but we were kinda messed up & stuff.

Also kinda stuck with the story, like the middle bit isn't working right & I wanna redo it, but the characters won't cooperate. Like, we got the whole thing detailed out in bullet points and stuff, so its like from their pov the story's done, they don't wanna go back & redo the middle bit?

And I'm afraid if I write out the end bit I won't be able to go back to the middle bit at all. So I keep trying to get the characters to go back to the middle bit & do it over, make it abit better.

Gonna try again this afternoon to get them to give me a new middle bit. Sooner or later it'll work & they'll cooperate!

Viola

TogetherWeAreHope wrote:Well we want to write a novel (started it) so I guess we are writers, pretty imaginative and everything always liked telling stories. People probably would think we are making all of this up.

Honestly we haven’t hardly posted anything on this forum because Star is scared silly about writing stuff on here. Anything that can link us to our life in any way is a no to write on here. She thinks that our family will find this somehow and probably would say things like “what are you doing on some crazy website, pretending you have DID or that you’re insane, or making up you’re these other characters, talking to weirdos, what are you doing”. We always think people will think of us as made up, imaginary friends, pretend, overthinking everything. Can’t see a psychologist or anyone so I don’t know what to do.

Hopefully your situation isn’t too difficult.

I think I’ve rambled on long enough so I should probably depart from your thread now, if someone replies to this, I’ll try to reply soon as I can.

Why can’t I figure out when to use we or I, my writing feels so broken here lol.

I also struggle with I/we on here though for obvious reasons I try and remember to use only I on any general forums.

Sometimes though (on here) one particular alter will start a post then another will join in, take over or just send their opinions that end up getting added in, whoever started it may sign it but then go back to read it later and realise it switches back and forth between 'I' and 'we' and others added bits!

Sioux (I think!!)

Amythyst wrote:Hey Sioux,

Thats pretty neat about the autobiography! Our memory's so mixed up we couldn't even try something like that lol.

I still haven't been able to do any more writing yet. Tried a couple times over the weekend but we were kinda messed up & stuff.

Also kinda stuck with the story, like the middle bit isn't working right & I wanna redo it, but the characters won't cooperate. Like, we got the whole thing detailed out in bullet points and stuff, so its like from their pov the story's done, they don't wanna go back & redo the middle bit?

And I'm afraid if I write out the end bit I won't be able to go back to the middle bit at all. So I keep trying to get the characters to go back to the middle bit & do it over, make it abit better.

Gonna try again this afternoon to get them to give me a new middle bit. Sooner or later it'll work & they'll cooperate!

Viola

I think we found the experience therapeutic most of us anyway. I don't think it will ever be published. The littles particularly Daisy shared more memories from childhood we had forgotten about and enjoyed looking through old photo's too.

It seems there were twin alters in childhood or there is a very vague distant memory of twins. The problem is we know there were real twins (in the real world) who lived up the road from us so I'm not sure whether we are confusing the memories of playing with them with any twins our child self may have imagined.

We think our child self may have imagined a twin for themselves so they always had a friend who understood them at a time they were getting bullied alot. Which may have led to a false memory of twin child alters for the adults when we've been trying to understand 'our system'.

Sioux

Hey Sioux,

That's cool. We don't have access to any kind of first-hand memories from childhood. The only sorta stuff we do have are like, a handful of 'snapshots', and a few 'factual' details that we don't really remember so much as we were told later?

I think the earliest first-hand stuff we know is from teens, like 14 ish? That's a guess tho, we don't have ways to tie the bits and pieces to actual dates or ages.

I get what you're saying about it being therapeutic. The story I just finished working on, kinda started out as a way to help us explore some things we have issues with ourselves. Like, some of us have internalized stuff that's negative & we needed to get it out front so we could examine it & stuff?

Tho it's also some wish-fulfilment kinda stuff too, like writing fictional stuff where the stories can always have a happy ending, even tho the journey is usually alot harder.

Yesterday I got through the bit where we were stuck, kinda just forced through it & I guess the characters cooperated. And after that it was like the dam burst or something lol. I finished the whole thing in one day, probably wrote over 10,000 words. I know the last chapter is almost 8000 words & I wrote that in one go yesterday afternoon / evening.

Now it's all kinda settling in my head, I gotta do editing & stuff. Then we'll see what happens next. Definitely gonna write more, just not sure yet if it'll be the same characters in a 3rd story, or if I wanna take a break from them & do something else.

Viola