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.
The Autistic Writer: Deadlines
Many writers have a love/hate relationship with deadlines. That is to say, writers love to hate them.
Jokes aside, deadlines are a crucial pillar of a writing career. Mostly for the benefit of the publication for which the writer is working, but for the writer as well, though many may be loath to admit it.
With few exceptions, I have always me my deadlines for work done for other people. Even in the rare situation when I couldn’t quite make it, it angered nobody but myself. I wouldn’t test the patience of any editor by being habitually late, as that would be wholly unprofessional, but I have been fortunate enough to never be involved in any ugliness when those handful of deadlines passed without my filing.
Punctuality appears to be not merely a common trait for those on the Spectrum, but a near obsession. It is for me. I’ve had to pretend frequently, for the sake of certain relationships that I don’t care about someone being late.
In truth, I despise lateness. If you say you will show up at 6:00PM, and half passed arrives without a word from you, I’ll be irritated bordering on offended. Most of the time I won’t express it to you, but I’m probably fighting every urge to that effect for at least the first 15 minutes we’re together.
What I expect from others I must therefore expect of myself. If I agree to a time, I stick to a time, even at the expense of other events. If that proves impossible, I will contact the other party ASAP. Barring extreme circumstances, nobody will be left waiting and wondering on my account.
There are times when this helps with writing, as I said. With a deadline, obviously, a writer has to get on with it. A professional won’t just toss in garbage drafts for the sake of being on time, but they will not, cannot obsess over perfection of every phrase if it prevents them from making progress toward an established deadline.
Deadlines are probably why, despite many other issues at hand, I did so well in college.
That’s not to say I’d never appreciate a less tight deadline for any given pitch or assignment. As I mentioned in a previous post about interviews, I require a lot of mental preparation to accomplish all the various requirements of a written piece. There are times it isn’t quite enough time for me.
Not to mention, I have an Autistic longing some days to delve deeper into a topic than a given freelance piece will allow. Rare is the writer, outside of the highest echelons of the industry, that has the luxury to spend weeks or months covering every possible angle before writing the piece. How I’d love the chance to do that. The work would be hard, but the result worth it.
It is what it is, and better to write on a tight deadline, than not write at all, of course.
As an indie-author of fiction, my deadlines are my own. There is always a danger of blowing a deadline set for one’s self, but thankfully, this is also rare for me. Otherwise, the previously mentioned Autistic perfectionism would prevent me from ever publishing anything.
This very piece, for example. I am writing it in the midst of my own self-imposed weekly deadline for this project. Which means, I can and will conclude here, in order to make it.\
(I was finished anyway…)
The Autistic Writer: The Spectrum In My Fiction
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.
The Autistic Writer: Interviews
Taken as a whole, my writing usually falls under either fiction, or creative non-fiction. (personal essays or books about writing itself.) As a sometime freelance contributor, to a regional magazine in particular, about a quarter of what I work on requires interviewing others.
As you might imagine, my Autism plays a larger role in this than perhaps any other aspect of my writing career.
Don’t misunderstand; I am not afraid of the people I talk to for me, (mostly) human interest profile pieces. The vast majority of them live and work in the same general communities as I do. That provides at least a tertiary level reference point between us. Even without that slight connection fear isn’t the problem.
However, depending on several factors, I think of Edgar Allen Poe’s opening line to his story The Tell Tale Heart:
“True! Nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am…”
That probably overstates the issue, but I do love that line.
Unlike Poe’s protagonist, the nerves I feel before an interview are not due to guilt, nor as I mentioned to fear. I liken it more to bracing for impact. Not a deliberate impact from a malevolent force, mind you. More like a large piece of debris blown toward your car in a violent storm. It’s coming, you know it’s coming, and you can’t do a damn thing about it but keep an eye on it, and prepare yourself for the blow.
Neither the debris nor the gale has personal feelings against you, they just exist in proximity to you. Doesn’t mean you won’t get shaken up when the wayward yield sign slams into your windshield.
The further someone on the Spectrum is from their safest, most comforting scenario, the more energy they require to meet expectations. If socializing is involved, more energy is required. If socializing with a stranger, greater levels still. And if it’s part of your job? A full day of doing nothing in order to prepare for the interview, followed by a full day to recover afterwards is not uncommon for me. That kind of energy and focus cannot simply be thrown around at will by someone with ASD. What drains them may vary, but the act of being drained is common to just about all Autistic people.
Not to mention the particular frustrations of setting up an appointment with the interview subject. It almost always requires the telephone, which I despise.
And because I consider it part of my job to assure the subject of the interview is comfortable, given that they are doing me a favor, I usually meet them at a location of their own choosing. Eight times out of ten, it’s a local place that I have nonetheless rarely or never visited before. Not a problem in its own right, but by the time I’ve looked up where it is, the directions, where to park, and acclimated myself to the surroundings, half my energy for the interaction is already depleted.
Compounding everything is the ever-present frenemy of all professional writers: a deadline.
Sure, give me two months to research, plan, and prepare for an interview with the bookstore owner 20 minutes outside of my familiar city, and almost nothing will detract from the interview itself. For most assignments involving interviews I get between two and three weeks. It often takes a week just to reach the right person, even with a phone. (Which once again I will mention, I hate using.)
Once the interview begins, and I get an initial notion of how the other person talks, how comfortable they are and so on, my nerves stabilize. They may never reach resting comfort, but I’m able to move them to the side and ask my questions, listen to their answers, and it’s almost always professional-pleasant.
I go home, lay in bed for a while in silence, and then start mapping out the final piece that I will write over the follow days. My various editors are happy with it, and all is well.
Eventually. But not after almost every common Autistic trigger is initiated, and I feel like doing nothing else at all for a while.
Now that I think of it, aside from the obvious fact I am not a murderer, Poe’s dramatic line may be a better descriptor of my nerves before an interview than I first thought.
Ty Unglebower 