The Autistic Writer: Work Spaces
I published a book a few years ago called 14 Fantastic Frederick County Writing Spots. In that free non-fiction guide, as you can probably guess, I highlighted and described 14 different, non-traditional places in my home county in Maryland where one could work on one’s writing.
While I don’t visit each of these myself on a regular basis, I have done writing at some point in all of them, and will certainly do so again.
That’s because I tend to need time away from home in order to accomplish a certain amount of writing over time.
I thrive on routine, as an Autistic adult. Yet on the opposite side of that coin is at time a potent restlessness that renders work, particularly writing work more laborious.
For lack of a term, I can “disappear into myself” more at home that away from home. This doesn’t always mean that I sit in a dark room saying and doing nothing. (Though that happens too.) But home is almost too safe, if you will, to write certain things for certain amounts of time.
Reject the notion that we must be constantly uncomfortable in order to create. Yet even the most imaginative person ever needs to muster at least some external mental energy, if they ever expect anyone else to enjoy what they do.
In other words, the words won’t write themselves.
I will never deny the possibility that a rich inner world, present in myself and many other Autistic people is useful, perhaps a gift for the arts-oriented person, but thankfully nobody else can enter my mind and see what I have come up with. I have to write it out.
The very act of not being at home requires me to avoid that potential full immersion into my own consciousness. That extra slice of alertness to my surroundings allows for a mindset just conducive enough to compose the words on a regular basis.
Take my upcoming novel, The Rubble and the Shakespeare for example. Earlier on I had gone months being unable to summon the proper mental state to write more than a sentence or two at a time, if that. Only once I determined to take my laptop to the local branch library every day did I break free from that slump enough to finish the first draft by the fall of 2022.
I have a preferred table at that library, and I tend to go there within the same two hour range even without thinking of it each visit. Obviously, preference for routine will never abandon this ASD mind of mine. Much of my writing, lifetime, has still happened at home.
Nevertheless at times even I can distract me, and putting on just that thinnest of masks out in public makes me more productive.
(Even if, ironically, I write this post sitting in my bedroom.)
Ty Unglebower 