According to Simon Baron Cohen, I can´t have AS!

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Don't know if anyone has mentioned it, but Tony Attwood, in his Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome, claims that it is quite common for girls with AS to become interested in reading and writing fiction.

I used to write lots of fiction as a child and still do to this day.

Although I don't write, I made and make up stories in my head. I was (and still) am very imaginative, and as a child loved to act out stories with my stuffed animals/plushies.

writing funny stories was the only highlights in school that i remember whatsoever. it was the only moments when my classmates liked me, and laughed WITH me

didnt take them long to remember what a worthless loser i was, once the loud-reading sessions was over tho

I love creative writing but I remember in school I couldn't do it. The teacher would have to really push me. I didn't know that people used their own experiences to help with creating writing or that they put themselves into the story. I ended up writing about being invisible at school.
Now all I do is come up with creative stories. It just took some time for me to know how to do it.

What are the other 9 things?

As far as I've seen, females with AS tend to be of the fan fiction make if they like writing, i.e., using the characters from another established story for their own. I suppose they could apply their current interest to the writing, like most people do, but it shouldn't deviate from their interest. As Attwood will tell you, it's the extent of how far the interest transposes over other things determines if it's AS or not.

If the girl is interested in horses, her writing will encompass such, for example (the woman who likes criminal justice stuff will include the same).

Again, I think that's wrong.

Imaginative fantasy type stories and creative writing has been my longest obsession, and one of my all time favourite activities. I was diagnosed with AS years ago, before anyone really knew what it was (I'd never heard of it before in my life when I was diagnosed).

So unless all of us diagnosed aspies who love creative writing have been misdiagnosed (and there appears to be a lot of us) Simon Baron Cohen is wrong.

And don`t forget Henrik Ibsen, Gro Dahle, Arne Garborg, (possibly Knut Hamsun) and Isaac Asimov. Steven Spielberg and Satoshi Tajiri are also pretty creative.

sunshower,

If writing is your obsession [at the time], it wouldn't be wrong then. Some people have a more broad area of interest, like writing or music, whereas others prefer a narrower topic.

If a person's obsession was horses, they probably wouldn't enjoy writing, reading, drawing or etcetera if it didn't involve horses.

Yes Skilpadde---thanks for adding. Two of my favorite movies were directed by Steven Spielberg---Duel and Jaws.

I find it interesting that Spielberg used the same sound effect of the dinosaur roar for the truck in Duel going over the cliff as he did for the shark in Jaws exploding and sinking to the ocean floor. I love to hear Spielberg talk about comparing the truck and the shark in these movies.

I used to love making up stories.

So much so that I was even told off occasionally for babbling yarns when no-one wanted to listen. I had done this ever since the teacher had said: "Don't tell stories." I was upset by this because I took her literally at the time so I decided to tell my own stories in protest. What the teacher actually meant was "Don't lie and leave a tangled web of deception: tell the truth". Looking back on it, fictional stories could technically be regarded as "lies" made up for the purpose of entertainment.

When I was little I wrote a story about a golden retriever who went out for a walk in the woods. The teachers were shocked/delighted at the level of detail I included: the texture of the dog's soft fur; the fur's sheen; the crispness of the leaves; the metallic rusty colours of the leaves; the smell of the horse-chestnuts...

This piece of descriptive writing focussed on the natural scenery and the dog. The man was in the background so to speak. I didn't describe him much or what his social motives were. I honestly didn't see the need to. The man's function in the story was to simply walk the dog from A to B. To this day, if I see someone walking his/her dog, my eyes zoom in on the dog first, not the person.

I have always enjoyed and written fables. I am particularly drawn to anthropomorphic characters. Perhaps I'm more comfortable with animals taking on human characteristics than reading about humans interacting with humans. Perhaps animal characters allowed me to learn/understand about human motives and societies without having to deal with these issues directly. The animals in effect acted like a screen or humans wearing animal masks. Perhaps this was a sort of coping mechanism. For some bizarre reason, humans portrayed as humans still scare me.

Later on, I excelled in descriptive creative writing, particularly in capturing the background atmosphere and the physical details. Several of my stories were centered on objects, machinery or buildings.

I have included ball-point pens, a railways and paintings as focal points in my writing.

I was so overjoyed when I was given a descriptive writing assignment to describe my "dream house". I described the features of the architecture with metaphors and similes. Inside the mansion there was a staircase that "winded around in a spiral like the inside of a snail's shell. I described how I walked through each room and gallery of the house alone (there was no estate agent!).

Wow, thanks a lot for your replies! I guess Simon Baron Cohen has been unanimously outvoted...

How wonderful to have the chance to learn about autism the real way: through people who really are autistic! I guess a lot of these non-autistic people just don´t really know what they are talking or writing about. But it´s a shame in a way, because they are considered authorities. It may be that much harder for some undiagnosed people to realize that they may be autistic, if they don´t fit the stereotypes or common beliefs.

Well....

When I was in Elementary school, we had to write something every day. Either we got a specific topic that we had to write about, or it was free. As I recall, writing was my favorite thing in school - (unless a particular subject turned me on. Sometimes, some of my special interests were inspired by something we learned in school). Most of my stories were about animals. Some of them were about special interest subjects- American Indians, witches, faeries, 18th dynasty Egypt.

In the Junior High, I discovered humor, and how to write parodies...(as I recall, "Mad" magazine, or something like it, did that for me). I used to write romances in the style of Barbara Cartland, where I would pit 2 unlikely teachers together...(or sometimes I used people who bullied me!) Many people thought these stories were very funny, and always asked when I would write my next story.

Nowadays, I don´t do creative writing anymore. I also don´t read fiction, though I did when I was young. I´m not sure why. I think I´ve just moved on to other things. I´m still very creative though, and I think I always will be.

Yes, I took the AQ test 3 times, mostly because I felt unsure of my answers, or was worried I wasn´t interpreting the questions right- (some of them are just too general for me; I´d actually rather write an answer, in essay form, to explain myself. Sometimes, the questions were just too "wide open" to find one specific, all-encompassing answer. Of course, maybe I analyze too much).

What was strange was that I took 2 different versions of the same test. The questions were worded SLIGHTLY differently, but that really can make a difference in how one interprets them. Also, in one version, 2 of the answers were different! Which made me worry about the validity of the test. Funny enough, every time I took the test- even though I sometimes answered a little differently, or the answers themselves were different- I always got a 36. So, maybe there is consistency after all?

I started a thread about the AQ test recently, it may still be in listed in the AS forum. I asked what people thought about the questions. I remember there were quite a few questions about imagination, too. I have a good imagination and I´m very bad with numbers, so....

Here they are:

1)I find social situations confusing

2)I find it hard to make small talk

3)I am good at picking up details and facts

4)I find it hard to work out what other people are thinking and feeling

5)I can focus on certain things for very long periods

6)People often say I was rude even when this was not intended

7)I have unusually strong, narrow interests

I do certain things in an inflexible, repetitive way

9)I have always had difficulty making friends

Come to think of it, people also don´t say I´m rude. When I was a child, my mother drilled politeness in me. As a child and teenager, I was formal, stilted, and very, very polite. Although now that I´m an adult I may be discovering my natural rudeness, finally.

Weird, an extra emoticom appeared on my last post...don´t know how that happened...

I could have sworn I wrote an "8", but it came out as a face.

I've written fan fiction, and I have wondered if it's a lack of imagination in some ways in that I can write stories that simply put a set of predefined characters into a variant on their canon situation, but I cannot write original fiction and actually create characters and their universe. I am the same in many creative activities. If you present me with the 'building blocks', I can arrange them in a pleasing pattern, but I cannot create the blocks from scratch. I simply don't know where to begin.

I had no problems imagining the physical setting, the details, the fantasy, the metaphors and the general atmosphere of my fictional writing.

It was always the dialogue between human characters that gave me the trouble.
The social motives of the characters in all my short stories were very straight-forward perhaps because I had only been exposed to a limited social/emotional repertoire at home.

I always seemed to come up just slightly short of top marks in literature: now I've figured out why. Thank goodness for revision notes and study guides! Without them, I'd have had difficulty fathoming all of the characters' social motivations.

However, general themes, imagery, metaphors and environmental descriptions I didn't usually have a problem with.

My writing always seemed to have an observational rather than a social slant to it.

Sometimes, I throw a book down in disgust because the characters are so socially dependent on each other and do some very silly things by succumbing to peer pressure. This has never been an issue for me. How those characters behave are not how I would behave. I either scold the book out-loud or rewrite part of the story saying what the characters should have done so that I can feel happy again. Sometimes I even omit the characters I find the most irritating/boring or introduce my own. People look at me funny when I do this. If the story involves animals, strangely, I don't seem to want to edit the story as much, if at all.