Autism is my worst writing enemy,
and my best writing friend.
Writing characters is a challenge in my fiction writing because I am autistic. I have great difficulty
writing believable, consistently inconsistent
characters. These are the kind of characters that say one thing but do
something opposite, whose motivations and actions do not match; in other
words, who act like real people.
What
does my autism have to do with my character writing problems?
Everything.
Conventional writing wisdom says
that characters need arcs; they must change over some way. This makes no sense
to me. Why does a character need to change? I don’t change.
I’m told to write believable,
realistic characters—consistently inconsistent characters. Inconsistent? That’s
not how my mind words. I’m a “Say what you mean, and mean what you say, please”
person.
What motivates your characters? What causes them to act, or
react in a certain way? How do other characters respond to her? What motivates
a character? I don’t know, in fact, what motivates people. People are strange;
they make no sense.
Struggling to understand
character’s motivations highlights how much I don’t understand people. How
completely and totally mind-blind
I really am; how I can never figure out what makes people tick. Although my
mind-blindness hinders my ability to write effective characters, my autism
gives me many writing advantages.
There are aspects of the autistic
brain that are wired perfectly for effective writing.
The autistic writer is
literal-minded by neurology. Our brains are hard-wired to think and take words
literally. Remember Amelia Bedelia the literal-minded maid who continually
misinterpreted instructions to comical effect? Amelia must have been autistic.
We have an innate need to get to
the point, no chit-chat, no small talk—give me the facts and let me get on with
my day. The need to get to the point makes it easier to filter the “noise” out
of our writing, to say what we mean, and mean what we say, and to do it
quickly.
Autistic people tend to focus on
details rather than the whole. That makes us very detail oriented. The need for
exactitude causes our writing to be rich in accurate details that many people
often miss. An apple cannot simply be
red, what kind of red was it? Crimson, candy-apple, garnet, burgundy, ruby,
blood red—what color is blood red exactly?
