The Autistic Writer: The Spectrum In My Fiction

tyunglebower ♦ August 9, 2023 ♦ Leave a comment

It could be said that everything I ever write is to some degree influenced by Autism Spectrum Disorder. ASD is after all fully a part of who I am, and my writing comes from me.

Still, and I’ve mentioned this previously in this series, I’m not making a statement about or on behalf of Autism in everything I write. In fact, that isn’t usually my goal. Nothing I write requires an Autistic point of view to understand. It’s an influence, not a strategy.

I’ve talked about my light fantasy novel, The Beacons I See. To date, it is the only work of my fiction featuring a protagonist directly stated as Autistic. Vanessa is not a stand in for myself, but much of what she goes through is informed by what I have experienced as an Autistic person myself. And I lend a particular credibility to such a story that a neurotypical author could not offer.

Then there are those things I’ve written that are not about Autism, but came from my exploring my own Autistic tendencies while I wrote. My experimental novella The Italics Are My Own is the best example. It’s surreal, not entirely linear, and highly symbolic with (intentionally) my most flowery prose to date.

The format is mixed. Part script and part conventional narrative, wherein the character in each do not know each other. The former, two old friends in increasingly vague conversation. The latter, the meandering journey of four men through different vignettes on an undefined mini-odyssey inspired by art.

No character in the piece is Autistic, but in some ways, it is so far my most Autistic book. I allowed a chaos and verbosity of certain Autistic moods to dictate the writing in a way that I have never done before.

If I had to choose second place for my most Autistic book, it would be my anthology of short stories, Order! Ten Stories, Ten Very Different Meetings. In each of the ten tales, as you can guess, a meeting takes place. A different rule of Robert’s Rules of Parliamentary Procedure is explored in each.

I don’t have that book memorized by any means. But I have always thrived on, and been fascinated by precise order. When enforced properly, (and it rarely is), Robert’s Rules appeal to both a special interest of mine, and my deep longing for organization to accomplish a goal.

The stories range various genres, and read like standard short fiction narratives for the most part. The structure is conventional, but anybody on the Spectrum would quickly agree the overall concept is quite Autistic.

I wrote my very first novel, Flowers of Dionysus before I knew I was on the Spectrum. It’s another light fantasy, and tells the story of Matt, a disillusioned community theatre actor trying to keep a failing production afloat when he meets the ancient Greek God of Theatre.

Much of Matt’s arc deals with him having given up his passion for local theatre because of how little passion he found for it on behalf of others. Poor attendance, fellow actors that half-assed too often, and not enough cooperation in the community. He does have a certain frustration that I think Autistic folks would understand when it comes to taking things seriously. My own passion for theatre inspired the novel, as did a dream I once had. But ASD certainly smiled on the undertakings.

Especially those of Centauri Starr, one of the point of view characters. I wrote her as deeply introverted, highly sensitive and often overwhelmed. Most kept her at a distance, believing her to be a bit of a bitch based on her demeanor, even though she’s not.

Sound familiar?

Milton Crouse, the main character in my only cozy murder mystery, Murder. Theatre. Solitaire. might read Autistic, as I look back on him. But theatre comes into play more than neurodivergence, I’d say. Present for a murder in a snowed in Vermont resort, Milton uses his 25 years experience as a theatre director to interpret the emotions and, “blocking” of everyone else in an attempt to of course discover the killer.

His attention to such detail, and his general calmness despite the circumstances could be Autism coded if that made any given reader feel happy. But there is nothing in the way I wrote him that I intended to indicate Autism. Then again, there is nothing I wrote that excludes to possibility either.

My afterlife fantasy There Is Pain Here, featuring the ghost of slain U.S. President James Garfield probably offers the least in way of hints at the author’s Autism. It’s my deepest dive into world building though. Perhaps certain Autistic perspectives contributed to the fantasy milieu of the protagonist. I can’t discount it or confirm it.

And what of my upcoming novel, The Rubble and the Shakespeare, due out in November?

In it, a refugee in a city partially destroyed in his nation’s civil war agrees to help a friend find a decent empty venue in which to produce The Tempest. The fallen government was tyrannical, and had banned Shakespeare, and other literature, and so this is the first exposure most in his neighborhood have to such things.

As the author, I’ve not pursued anything in this latest work that resonates Autistic to me. I will look back on it again some day when time has passed.

However, of all these works I’ve mentioned, my current work in progress was influenced by my Autism in a unique manner. The physical act of writing it has taken my longer than any of the other books I’ve mentioned here.

Part of that you can blame on the general social malaise of the pandemic, Yet even without COVID-19, the part of my brain in charge of writing too a backseat to the Autism for months at a time. I had to allow myself this healing time, this time to sort of “sink” into a world-weariness born of being an Autistic adult at times.

We mustn’t wreck our mental health as writers, even for the sake of our stories. We pretend otherwise sometimes, but authors are in fact humans. And this human suffers from Autistic burn out from time to time. Months went by without me working on The Rubble and the Shakespeare during late 2021 and early 2022. Once I got back at it though, I never looked back, and I am eager to release this book this fall.

A book that in a different way fell under my Autism’s influence.

Don’t let that concern you though. Above all else, these are just good stories I wanted to tell, and that I hope you will read someday.