The Autistic Writer: Writer Retreats
Writer’s retreats. Some swear by them. They can range anywhere from a few hours at a local state park with a brown bag lunch and a writers group, to several weeks in idyllic or even exotic locations, with meals provided.
Needless to say, unless you’ve won a contest, the more a retreat provides the higher the price.
Like most writers, for the time being the cost of most such experiences is prohibitive.
Yet if money were no object, the prospect of a retreat would still give me pause. There’s much to consider for an Autistic mind before embarking on such an adventure.
Obviously, there is the social aspect. People with Autism are not de facto anti-social. (Some are, just as with anybody else.) Yet their ability to read social cues, to fully understand the nature and purpose of a social interaction is skewed from the norm in most cases. Couple this with a not-uncommon propensity for sensory overload and an Autistic writer may get less done on a retreat than they do at home. (Which is often the “safest” space for them.)
I would argue the biggest concern is the accommodations. Sleep, or bedtime if one sleeps little, is a key time for an Autistic person. I venture to say a roommate of any kind but particularly a stranger would be a deal breaker for most of us. Even if only for a few days, this is a vulnerability that would detract from everything else; I would almost certainly not attend a retreat that required rooming with someone.
These concerns don’t stop at bedrooms, however. How much socializing with other attendees is expected? Are there seminars at the retreat? Are they required or optional? Is there any limit to how large these are? What may be just a description of the experience for some could make or break the entire affair for someone with Autism. I myself would want to keep any expected discussion to a minimum at any retreat I attended, though I personally could handle one or two.
How about meals? Many people on the Spectrum have what are called “safe foods,” or meals they can eat over and over, particularly when other aspects of their day are unpredictable. Can attendees bring their own food? Are any of these safe foods on the menu of the retreat?
Are meals communal? Plenty of retreats I’ve looked into require attendees to come together for meals. Nightmare of nightmares some requires participants to help prepare same. The horror!
A handful of the higher end retreats bring at least a lunch to the writer’s door so as not to disturb them. I cannot squeeze blood from a stone, but this option would be worth me scrounging for money to afford said luxury, all things being equal.
Can one visit the campus before signing up? The newness of the surroundings would in most cases not bother me if they were otherwise acceptable. But plenty of people with ASD would appreciate or even need to familiarize themselves with the environment before ever making the decision to attend. Does the retreat in question allow this?
I myself want to be at least within hollering distance of others, as opposed to alone on a mountain road, despite my often-solitary nature. This is in case I become flustered or disoriented in the event of an emergency. One of my fears no doubt connected to my Autistic wiring.
Urban vs rural. Large population vs. small. Seasons. Organizing institution. Distance from home. All or some of these things, along with plenty more, will determine the usefulness and pleasure of a writers retreat to an Autistic writer.
Make no mistake, however. The ideal of a retreat for writers is not at all threatening to the Autistic mind. In fact, once all of the above-mentioned aspects are taken into consideration, the basic ideal of a retreat may be just what an Autistic is looking for.
The quiet. The (at least part time) isolation. The guaranteed lack of distraction. “Permission,” to hand everything over to our creative side. A schedule, if only for a few days, that we can consume entirely with imagination. A retreat with just the right balance of components may just be a temporary utopia for a person’s Autism as well as their writing process.
And despite what I’ve already mentioned here, don’t discount the social aspects of a retreat. So long as interacting with others is 100% voluntary and not a requirement in the offered package, a writers retreat might help us rid ourselves of the dreaded small talk. Everyone there, after all is a writer, working on a project. This means a built in special-interest for a time. You always know at least one topic everyone is willing to discuss with you. Under those conditions even I could see myself talking to strangers.
A little bit. If I meet my word count for the day. And if I can eat alone. Without a roommate. And they have the food I want.
So yes. My ASD will affect my choice of retreat as much if not more than the price. But it won’t keep me away.
Maybe someday, when I sell enough copies of everything.
Next week I’ll explore the related but distinct topic of writer residencies.
The Autistic Writer: Handwriting
Aesthetics are a lesser mentioned aspect of being on the Spectrum. Whether it be an avoidance of certain clothing due to a repulsion to a color/material or spending hours of labor and hundreds of dollars on displaying collections, Autistic people often make use of aesthetics and milieu to make their segment of the world more comfortable for them.
Hyperfixations and “special interests” are active components in this as well as comfort. So much so that sometimes we on the Spectrum sacrifice a bit of comfort for the sake of the presentation.
Comfort will in most cases win out eventually. But if one is stubborn, (as I am about some things), it could take quite some time.
I have a bit of a fixation on paper and ink, writing and drawing.
This doesn’t sound surprising. I’m a writer after all. These elements fit right in to that. In fact, aren’t they required?
Well, no.
The truth is, I can barely write with my hands.
My difficulty with handwriting goes back as far as my ability to read words. Not only has my printing always been bad, and my cursive worse, the physical act of writing is uncomfortable to me, bordering on painful depending on circumstances.
We’ve never known exactly why. Words such as “disgraphia” have been mentioned, but no diagnosis has been made in that regard. All I know is that I can write uninterrupted by hand for three fourths of a page on a good day before the pain and or numbness in my hand sets in. Undeterred it can radiate as far as my upper arm and even parts of my shoulder.
From 8th grade until only a few years ago, I wrote nothing in cursive but my signature. A combination of the aforementioned pain, and the fact that at best it was 50% legible if I moved at anything approaching a productive pace meant that I gave it up.
Even when writing slowly, I often lost the memory of how to form certain letter combinations.
What I started journaling, I opted to use cursive again on a regular basis. The same with my “writer ideas” notebook that I take with my most places. It’s an expensive item, and printing feels unworthy of it’s quality.
I want to be the person that literally writes many things, instead of typing them. At least at first. It’s that fixation on the aesthetic of ink scratched onto blank pages and forming thoughts.
But despite years of attempting to make this a regular practice, nothing has eased the quick pain during the process, and the frequent illegibility of the result. Grips, accessories, page angles, ink types, pen types, hand positions, very low speed movements: it doesn’t matter. The handicap, whatever it’s nature, remains.
Meaning that writing of any length, or required speed requires typing.
As I said, I am at times obstinate about it. I still in the back of my mind pretend I am just an idea away from pain free handwriting. Intellectually, however, I know damn well it will never happen.
Only in the last year, well into my attempted, bullheaded attempt at a handwriting renaissance have I begun to switch away from cursive, and back into printing in notebooks, (and for poetry…never type poetry.) Even printing requires concentration and frequent breaks during which I shake out my hand like a damp rag. But at least I can usually read the words before me, and reference them as needed. (You know, the entire point of writing something down?)
I have much to say, and like everyone have only so many hours and days in which to say it. To come even into the same solar system of saying all of it, I must type more, not less, as time goes on. This would be true even if I myself am the only audience. It’s just plain silly to deceive myself on this issue. Writing out poems, quick thoughts into a notebook, and going by hand in a nice journal are as far as it will ever go.
Yet when I visualize my very identity as a writer, I don’t see this laptop, despite 90% of everything I have ever done being types. I see pages, and ink wells, pens and bindings and even the occasional quill and parchment for kicks.
Much like my sensory-based hatred of tight clothing on my skin, this neurotic obsession, cousin to my Autism shall remain, even in the face of evidence for better results from other approaches.
At least there is always my signature.
The Autistic Writer: Coming of Age
Last week I mentioned how stories of bullying don’t appeal to me in fiction, as both a writer and a reader. In quick review, it hits too close to home for me to find any redeeming qualities in such story arcs.
Today I want to talk about another common narrative theme in fiction that I dislike just as strongly. Only in this case, it’s for what amounts to the opposite reason.
I’m talking about so called “coming of age” stories.
If a movie or book is described as such, it’s already lost me. Not spending the time.
Why? Not because it hits too close to home, but because it is too foreign, not relatable at all to me.
I have of course been on the Autism Spectrum my entire life. Yet this wasn’t discovered until well into my adulthood. So imagine not only going through the difficulties of growing up Autistic, but not having enough knowledge to label very specific problems for what they were. I knew only I was weird in such a way as to repel and repulse most people my own age.
Even erstwhile friends kept a certain distance to point.
One of course gets older, more mature perhaps, but in a vacuum of social isolation I endured for most of my lonesome childhood, one is never anointed with the sacred oils of a “coming-of-age” story.
Being seven when my father died, and having no other family males step into my life to be even a partial male role model for this often “feminine” boy certainly put a hell of a damper on a more typical coming of age experience. Yes, I would have rejected much of what could have been offered, but knowing it was there would have provided at least some rungs on archetypical ladder to what was once called “manhood.”
Let’s be frank about the topic, though. Though any number of turning points in a child/teen’s life can be the focus of a coming of age tale, what little I have read/watched almost exclusively involves the rapturous loss of virginity. Short of that, it centers around a first kiss or first love situation.
Sex has never been a driving force in my life, even when it is supposedly “everyone’s” driving force. It becomes exhausting in 7th or 8th grade to pretend you enjoy talking about someone’s “tits bouncing” during track practice for the 4th time during that lunch period, so you just stay quiet and let other people talk.
Which means, of course, you are labeled gay. On top of everything else you’ve already been labeled, that is.
To this day as I write this, I am not at all certain that the 9th grade subterfuge to get me to go out or at least flirt with a girl that supposedly expressed her attraction to me in secret was legitimate or an attempted humiliation. Autism means I wasn’t perspective enough to know, and I wasn’t desperately horny enough to barrel into anything without more information.
“Lack of information” was also the reason I talked myself out of crushes and interest in girls at a young age. Yes, fear of being rejected acted as ballast at times, it does for everyone. Yet if I couldn’t explain why a girl was more interesting than the others to me for a while, I dismissed it.
This is not riveting, or even moving plot fuel for novels.
My first kiss was my first kiss. It occurred, I appreciated it, it concluded. I describe my first sexual experience in the exact same way. Neither were, and have not in retrospect become pivotal moments of my existence. If I’m honest with you, I don’t even recall all of the exact details of either event, anymore than I can recall the exact details of the very first time I ever rode a bike or shook somebody’s hand.
And I was supposedly more of a man after these moments than I was before?
If I, a writer, am that ambivalent about the moments of my life that were literally my own “coming of age” story, how am I to ever come up with thoughtful fiction about a character’s “awakening”?
I could of course, read and watch more of those stories, and study them. Get an idea, as I so often have in life, how the rest of the world feels things I have never felt in order to write fiction about same. I have the intellectual capacity to do so, I suppose.
The problem is, as you have determined by now, I don’t give a rat’s ass about somebody coming of age. It is without a doubt some of the most boring fodder for storytelling in the entirety of the human experience.
As I mentioned above, not all stories labeled as coming of age must deal with these topics. I stand by my assertion that a majority do to at least a degree. Yet even the works that don’t even touch on (no pun intended) a sexual awakening as it were, delve into topics that overwhelming conform to a narrow definition of what it is to pass from childhood into adulthood, particularly in the United States.
I went through none of it, and am happy to keep it both off my bookshelves and out of my catalog.
The Autistic Writer: Bullying in Fiction
I was bullied without mercy or respite for the better part of five years of my schooling, spanning over three different schools. There were various reasons, no doubt, but I don’t hesitate at all to put my (then undiagnosed) Autism at the top of that list.
The majority of students, and even adults on the Spectrum in most surveys report having been bullied, or being bullied still. Early indicators suggest that even all other things being equal, the very presence of an Autistic person makes them stand out as an ideal target for bullying, even if their ASD is unknown. We seem to “give off a signal.”
My spirit, psyche, call it what you will, was irreparably damaged by these experiences. The scars and echoes affect me to this day under certain circumstances.
You absolutely could not separate my being a bullying victim from the rest of my human essence; it is a forever-engrained component of my identity.
I won’t write fiction about it.
This doesn’t merely mean I will never write a semi-autobiographical novel, or that I won’t use my experiences with bullying to inform a story. I mean I literally will not include bullying in stories that I write.
I barely ever read stories that feature bullying. If the jacket blurb tells me it plays a major role in the theme, the book goes back on the library shelf.
There are of course authors who work through their past traumas, (and by extension comfort current readers with similar traumas) by composing fiction inspired by their own experiences with bullying. It is a noble service, far beyond the power of their story. For me though, not only do I not wish to be reminded of my trauma any more often than I already am, I now see the majority of bullying story lines as gratuitous. Pointless. Like a sex scene in a non-streamy book for its own sake.
There is no redemption to me in bully-fiction.
Even vengeance fiction requires a deep dive into the initial assaults in order to be effective. I confess I could find a certain joy in a bully getting comeuppance, yet I simply will not write or read through the torture of the character required to make a vengeance plot in any way satisfying.
As an Autistic, I experience heightened sensory input, longer lasting and clearer memory, and an overall sense of protective isolation. Not to mention an enhanced sense of justice–justice I was denied every time that no work of fiction will replace. Ergo, it does me, the author, more harm than good to write it, and me the reader more harm than good to consume it.
Of course my characters go through tribulations, that’s what makes a story. But bullying is way too personal for me to include in my work.
I do use my life experiences, emotions, memories, opinions, moods and so on to inform my fiction writing. All authors do so to some extent. But all authors also have boundaries they refuse to cross—subject matter that will not include in their fiction no matter how moving it could be for readers, or cathartic it could be for themselves.
I have written essays and thought pieces about my bullying, because I consider that reportage. But if reality can be stranger than fiction, it can also at times be crueler. Children being bullied is a cruelty that is entirely too common in reality. You won’t find it in my fiction.
The Autistic Writer: Autistic Coding
The term “Autistic Coding” generally refers to the act of giving a fictional character distinctive traits that are near-identical to obvious common traits of Autism, without referring to said character as Autistic. (They are only “coded” to appear so.)
Coding happens in fiction with various community. There is race-coding and queer-coding. The concept can be problematic, particularly if the coding is based on stereotypes instead of facts, or if an author from a privileged class codes a character into a minority community without enough research, or making use of sensitivity readers.
Probably the most cited example today of an obviously Autistic-coded character, (despite at times vehement denial from creators) is Sheldon Cooper, from both The Big Bang Theory and, in younger form, Young Sheldon.
Because I have never watched either show, I can’t provide fully informed opinions on the character. But I can take some exception to aspects of what I have learned from other Autistic authors and consumers of such entertainment. I won’t go so far as to say an author should only writer characters that are identical to their own race/orientation/sexuality, but I don’t consider it a stretch to conclude that if a character is to be coded, for whatever reason, the author should have something akin to first-hand knowledge of the experience.
That being said, I myself have not put any Autism-coded characters into my fiction as of this writing. I very much doubt I would ever feel the need to do so. Far more likely, a character somewhere on the Spectrum would show up in my stories in such a way that whether or not they were Autistic would not be spotlighted. As an Autistic writer myself, some characters are bound to exhibit traits of Autism by virtue of there being some aspect of myself in almost everything I write.
That still wouldn’t mean the characters were Autistic-coded, as this would lack a definitive intention to 1) portray Autism for it’s own sake, 2) avoid the actual term.
To date, only one of my characters is written as Autistic, and described directly as such in context of the story. Vanessa Martine, the first-person protagonist of my fantasy novel, The Beacons I See. Even then, she’s an Autistic woman and very much comfortable with that, as opposed to a woman with Autism, (a term preferred mostly by non-Autistic people who shy away from “labels.”
But other traits of Autism are present in more than one of my works, even without the coding or the outright identifier. For example, like most people with ASD, all of the main characters of my novels so far tend to be introspective. Introverted with a preference for order instead of chaos, quiet instead of static, aware of details most people around them miss. Are each of them Autistic? Believe it or not, even I, the author, don’t necessarily know; with the exception of the aforementioned Vanessa it’s not important to the story I am telling.
Do I want readers to conclude all of my characters are Autistic without saying so? Again, no, because when an actual diagnosis of Autism was important to the story, I mentioned it. (Again, Vanessa.)
That isn’t to say that a reader’s head canon couldn’t put one of these other characters on the Spectrum. (Unless within the pages I specifically preclude it.) It just means I will never have a need to hop around the issue. I believe in some cases of coding, the issue is being hopped around. to allow for characteristics to take the place of personality and story.
Make no mistake; character-coding has at times been necessary, particularly in oppressive regimes/times. History is rife with circumstances where characters had to be queer-coded in particular if the author wanted any chance to tell their story to the world, until such time as society mind opens further. Coded character fiction had in fact played a role in said mind-opening itself.
But at least for now, I am an Autistic writer free to write of Autistic people. So just know that if that’s the goal, I’ll let you know within the story. Otherwise, maybe or maybe not…but no intentional coding on my part.
Ty Unglebower 