The Autistic Writer: Perfectionism
Autistic people of all stripes are often acutely aware when something is out of place, not as it should be. They share this trait with other neurodivergent types of course; obsessive compulsive disorder is a prime example. Nevertheless, when it comes to Autism this adherence to expectations often focuses on specific experiences or components of one’s daily life, not necessarily on every aspect of same. (Though as always there are variations.)
For a creative Autistic, the artist in question sets both the standard of the creation, and very much detects when the reality doesn’t match same. A healthy aspiration towards improving is crucial for artistic evolution, of course. Pride in one’s work.
However, a too rigid set of expectations for one’s self and one’s work, one that delays creation and stymies productivity is perfectionism.
Any self-aware creative, Autistic or not, will confess that perfectionism is in fact a losing battle in the end when it comes to the arts. No art is perfect. In some ways no art is ever so much as truly completed. To shackle one’s self to perfection runs the risk of destroying the artistic impulse within one’s self.
For an Autistic writer like myself, this means keeping at bay the temptation for one more edit, one more pass over, one more rewrite of just the first five pages. It isn’t quite there, but could be if I just do it again.
And again. And again.
It bares repeating that one need not be on the Spectrum to be a perfectionist to harmful levels. Autistic perfectionism however threatens to define one’s entire self worth, the acceptability of one’s entire daily life based on whether or not a creation is exactly what we see in our heads before we start.
The key to preventing such a mindset from swallowing us whole is to measure the quality of the project by how much work we have put into it, how much energy and emotion and passion…and then very intentionally by a certain time, let it go.
“Close enough,” sounds too lazy to adopt in full for this concept, but for lack of a better term, I will use it. Because very few things, fewer people in the world attain the level of mastery those with ASD sometimes expect of themselves and their contributions. We can always arrange a bookshelf of living room furniture to be exactly what we want. The lion’s share of being an artist is recognizing when you have created as much beauty and power as possible, and accepting that beyond a certain point, (there is not formula for knowing exactly when) we are painting a peacock.
I am not my work. I love my work, and it fulfills me when other people love it. I am proud of what I produce and will never put my name on anything that falls short of what I can do without killing myself.
But my work and myself are not the same thing. I think the inclination to feel otherwise is common for Autistic creators because so much of the rest of the world is out of sync with who we are, and we think our own creations must be exactly what we demand them to be.
More difficult than the writing itself is the moment when as an author I say of the project, “it’s enough.”
And I am enough.
The Autistic Writer: Tropes and Genre
Arbitrary rules and standards are an excellent way to drive Autistic people nuts.
Routine? Predictability? Keeping to an agreed upon schedule even for social activities? By and large we love those things. But going through with a process, a label, a system, or a guideline simply because “that’s the way it is”? You might as well ask those with ASD to stick our own heads in a toilet.
Often we get in trouble as children for asking authority figures “why?” Authority figures, teachers and administrators especially don’t like that question when it comes to instructions. Because I’m in charge, is likely the nicest answer you’ll get.
Even then, an answer to why would go a long way for those on the Spectrum. Explain the regulation to us, and we might just see its usefulness. Even if we don’t, we will be far more likely to follow it if we see a reason behind same.
This comes into frequent play for me an Autistic writer in two major ways.
To begin with, the idea of fiction tropes. A trope is something that has been used so often within a type of fiction that it is in fact expected of you. It has fallen off somewhat, but a longstanding trope in just about any fiction that wasn’t literary was the “need” for at least one brief sex scene in your novel. If a cis male and cis female exist within your story, one or both of them should be having sex before the story concludes. This was a trope for decades in the publishing industry. It would have made no more sense to me 50 years ago than it does today, and I would bristle at having to follow it.
If I wanted a sex scene, I would have written one.
But such were expectations.
I get it. Genre. Genres have tropes. Personally I don’t understand why a genre needs such tropes, if the theme and the setting match otherwise. Murder mystery readers expect a body before chapter three. A trope I have followed in my only murder mystery novel. But nobody has explained to me adequately why it isn’t truly “mystery” if the body doesn’t show up until chapter 8.
“Such is the genre.”
Which brings me to the second major way unexplained expectations weigh on me as an Autistic author: genre itself.
Fledgling writers are told to remain in a genre, no matter how often they write. If you write sci-fi first, keep writing sci-fi, at least under that name. Short stories, novels, movies, whatever, but pick a genre and be known for it. The key to success.
Why? I write fiction. The fiction I want to exist at the time of launching the project in question. There is usually a bit of fantasy in my work, but my up coming novel has none. My aforementioned murder mystery had none. I’m not flipping the bird to consistency here, but I simply don’t like being held to seemingly arbitrary expectations, by the industry, by other writers, even by readers. I have never seen evidence that staying within a narrow genre sells more books for me. Even if it did, would I give up the stories that are in me at any given time because they didn’t fit the genre attached to my name?
I confess, most marketing strategists would likely tell me I should do so. It establishes my “brand.”
To me, my brand is storyteller that, as my website says, “Shifts the Everyday a Few Inches.” I can’t imagine being moved to tell a tale but opting not to, leaving it fade within me because it’s not following tropes or genres.
Sorry, teacher. I’m not in school anymore and I don’t have to follow a rule of writing “just because” anymore.
The Autistic Writer: Info Dumps
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.
The Autistic Writer: Personas and Masks
People on the Autism Spectrum will often talk of “masking.” I myself have mentioned it several times in this series, but I’ll explain it in brief once more.
When someone with Autism masks, they are presenting a personality, state of being, attitude, or even an opinion that runs contrary to their nature in order to get along better in their environment. It can be a mask we place on ourselves with intent, or we may find that we are masking subconsciously at one point as a built in “survival” mechanism. Of course, as with so many other aspects of ASD, masking can represent a mixture of both, depending on any number of factors.
There are several masks I have worn on purpose in my life that I have worked on removing since my diognosis as Autistic. Plenty of the masking came about however without me even knowing it, and that is the hardest to get past. In some ways the mask hides me from myself, and certain things that are very much me om a deeper level are dismissed, or at least cautioned against by my intellectual side.
This dichotomy effects my life as an author in a number of ways.
I wouldn’t call my true self a marshmallow, so to speak. Certain amounts of distance, even coldness depending on the situation are in fact authentic. However, I feel that I am at my roots more placid of spirit than I appear. Less cynical than I project. Not a Teddy Bear, but perhaps a Kermit the Frog. Imaginative, whimsical, gentle as needed, but with the capacity to be annoyed if pushed. Healthy realism, but embracing magic.
I feel I project all intellect, all guarded semi-stoicism.
This wouldn’t surprise me; as a victim of bullying as a child, as well as total dismissal as a young adult, no wonder the childlike qualities within my soul become wrapped in a psychological cocoon I only recently realized I had constructed.
The result on the surface is a persona as an author that at times I fear doesn’t match most of the material I write. And by persona I don’t mean a total act, even if the public part of being an author requires a bit more polish than the private aspects. A persona when meeting readers, say, or doing book signings, or making videos talking about my latest work. The themes I tend to explore, and the feeling I wish to convey in my readers with most of my work could use a bit more of Kermit.
Naturally, an author’s work can’t always be a reflection of what they are, or we’d never have horror or murder mystery genres. But consider that Stephen King, for all his issues, is not a murderer. Yet he absolutely projects the sort of person that writes the books that bear his name.
Human imagination, and the awe it inspires in ourselves, and those around us, especially young people, is to me second only to human rights in the most vital aspects of being alive, and require a zealous defense. I am a proponent of wonder, and I like to believe my fiction tends to reflect that.
My TikTok videos on the other hand? My conversation about writing in groups? These weekly essays? They cling to a certain cynicism, a subtle doubt and at times a minor bite that is more my mask than myself—a mask I’ve worn so long for such reasons I cannot simply cease to wear it.
Does my fiction itself do a better job? If I may be allowed to assess my own work, I will say, yes, it does. My stories may at times fall a few yards short of the warmth I hope to convey, or the depth of imagination I aim to invoke. It’s a big, heavy mask, after all, and it will drip every now and then into the work in ways I may not notice right off.
The good news is that the work hits the mark more often than the man does at present. This may make for complicated, exhausting marketing efforts. It will also hopefully make for fiction that inspires. That’s why my tagline is “I shift the everyday a few inches.”
I ask you to give my work a try sometime, and you can be the judge.
The Autistic Writer: On a Whim
Over the years, I have been criticized for a lack of spontaneity. It’s an unfair assessment. Not that I think there is anything wrong with those are not spontaneous; I dare say it’s a somewhat overrated trait. It’s just that in the interest of accuracy, I refute the notion that I am never free-spirited.
Ty Unglebower 