The Autistic Writer: Info Dumps

tyunglebower ♦ September 6, 2023 ♦ Leave a comment

Info dumps. Anyone can do it, but it is often associated with Autistic people. The slightest chance to mention a special interest or a recent intense study and boom…a person on the Spectrum will share anything and everything they know about same, sometimes to their detriment. (It tends to put off people who are unaware of why it’s happening, or otherwise don’t care about the topic.

Thanks to years of masking, I don’t info dump much these days. I will admit I probably did so when I was younger, though, before I knew about my ASD. I was made to feel weird or annoying, or clearly out right ignored by friends and family when I did so that a callous developed so to speak, and I stopped sharing the vast majority of what was on my mind. Now it is second nature to refrain in from info dumping, even about my special interests, in most situations.

The tendency lives on stronger in my writing.

For most people, a book, a novel in particular, becomes bogged down and more difficult to read when filled with “purple prose” and labyrinthian back stories and prologues. The flowers of such language tend to suffocate the reader. It works and is praised in plenty of books of course, but as a rule of thumb for books, less is more.

A defining aspect of my revision process is making sure I am not telling the reader too much at one time. I have on occasion experimented with fiction wherein I let myself, as author, tell everything to my heart’s delight. I don’t regret it, but as I said, it was an experiment. In most cases I avoid what could easily become me explaining every thought, question and emotion a given character has during any given scene.

And it is thought and emotion, explanations of motivations and fears where I tend to info dump if I am not careful. It may not be “info” in the strictest sense of the term, but as I have spent much of my life being thwarted from full expression of my feelings, if not outright mocked for trying, I suspect those tendencies have spilled into my fiction’s early drafts. Hell, maybe even in later drafts depending on one’s personal preference, though it’s always pared down by the time you read it vs when I wrote it.

Not so much with descriptions, for whatever reason. In that case of description, I don’t even think Autism enters into it. Rather, Autism doesn’t affect it as much. I tend to relate to people and situations in terms of how it feels to be present. My sometimes-freakish memory for detail from long ago times in my life is based on the emotion the recalled days provided me more so than anything else.

At this point in my life, I confess to not often trusting other people to fully listen to what I am saying, or to seek full understanding of my feelings. I’ve gotten used to such distance from most of humanity. I do my best as I write fiction, however, to trust my readers to understand what is implied, so long as I have done my job in writing the circumstances well.

That means keeping it short, but always authentic, when writing.