Problems with Fiction Writing for people with ASDs

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Does having an autism spectrum disorder cause you to have certain problems with fiction writing?

In my own case, problems I have is that I start out with an opening scene and rather than moving forward, delve backward into my character's backstory. Which kind of prevents the story from going anywhere. (Maybe I should start with the ending scene and write the novel backwards? My therapist thinks that might be an idea.)

Also I am very self-critical to the point that after a certain point in writing I'm certain that every word I wrote is trash. (If I look back on it later I think it's great)

Another factor is being very disorganized, which makes it hard to get a story planned/put together, and also means that if I need a certain reference book, it may take a day-long search.

Has anyone else had specific writing problems that may be related to their autism spectrum disorder? Anyone have ways to deal with such issues?

The only things I've found is that making my Special Interests a part of the story is a good idea. Also, by making characters outcasts, orphans and/or freaks, I don't have to worry so much about writing 'normal' social interactions that I might not have the knowledge to write about well.

I've pretty much given up on writing fiction. I can write non-fiction or creative non-fiction all day long and have been published many times.

My fiction, though, doesn't work. People tell me it's not believable, even when I fictionalize something that really happened to me. My characters have no "life" to them.

The one short story I got published was more of a narrative than a character story. There was barely any dialogue in it at all -- it was mainly description. And it's the best piece of fiction I've ever written.

I just don't have enough of a sense of what various types of people tend to do in various situations and not enough imagination to create a completely different person. All my characters are the same person, pretty much, no matter how hard I try to make them different people.

The only way I can get a different character is when I "steal" one from someone else's fiction, but I'm not interested in writing fan fic or slash or any of that sort of stuff. I want to write original stories and I haven't enough imagination so I decided to give up and stick with non-fiction since I seem to do very well there.

Yes. I could only write fiction in school if it were around whatever I was obsessed with at the time.

I'm also very self-critical. I could spend a whole writing session on one sentence. It is unthinkable for me to begin writing with something other than the first sentence (as is often suggested to becoming authors)-- it has to be written in the correct order. With every sentence I write I must go back from the beginning and read it over again, which means writing can take a long time for me.

My imagination also sucks. I'm not a very imaginative person. I can't make up ideas out of thin air. It's like making up lies.

I'd be interested in seeing if someone can comment on these issues as well. So far I just avoid writing fiction, even though I avidly read it. On the other hand I'm very good at seeing a piece of writing by someone and in my head I automatically spot awkward sentences and am able to change them most of the time. In school my essays were always the best-- provided I was given a specific, nonfiction topic to write. I'd probably write well if I could actually write anything.

A lot of authors not on the spectrum go through the same thing IMO.

As for myself, I believe my AS helps me somehow, but I have a different problem. I keep getting my AD/HD moments when I am being creative and then I end up never following through with my projects.

That about sums it up for me. I can't write fiction. I can sit and stare at a page (or a computer screen) for hours, trying for all I'm worth to think of something. I can't even come up with any ideas I could write about unless they're very closely based on reality, and then I can't fictionalize said ideas because it feels like lying. On the plus side, though, it makes me a very (exceedingly) honest individual.

I think those are all common fiction writing problems.

I would think a problem that someone on the spectrum would have includes writing the dialogue and empathizing with an NT.

But I said that. Is it how I write or is it who I am that makes me get ignored at least half the time when I try to participate? Not just here, everywhere I go. I say something and it gets totally ignored and then someone else says the same thing but a little bit of a different way and everyone says, "what a great idea! I'm surprised no one said that!" and I stand there wondering if I'm invisible and inaudible.

Yeah, I only skimmed through the responses and didn't really read that part until after I'd posted my reply. Sorry.

I don't know about other people, but I tend to have to stare at semi-long posts at least four times before I finally decide to read it.

I read your post, and thought your difficulties sounded so horribly like mine, and so likely to be a huge obstacle when I start writing my NaNoWriMo in November, ( and I am already experiencing those sort of difficulties with a module for a Fiction Writing Course I'm on ), that I registered your post as very probably very sadly true about a lot of us, while hoping it wasn't ... so felt little desire to reply to it.

Ref. being ignored; I replied at length to irishwhistle's thread about writing story and executive dysfunction, because I so thoroughly identified with her problem(s), and then felt ignored exactly like you did when the following day she had not made any ref to my post at all so I deleted almost all of it.

But yes, this sort of difficulty with writing is all rather dreadfully familiar.

I am hoping that Randy Ingermanson's Snowflake Method will help, because it's obvious he's pretty aspie, and he had the same sort of problems ... and this is the solution he found, and he's been published now, several times ... not the sort of books that I personally would rave about, but "just about entertaining" sci-fi stories all the same.

Sparrowrose, what sort of non-fiction do you write?

NB. Ingermanson's Snowflake Method is here:

http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/snowflake.php

And "Writing the Perfect Scene" is here:

http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/scene.php

To the Opening Poster; I have found exactly the same thing happening, about a starting scene/idea which I seem absolutely unable to move forward from and instead end up delving into "backstory", the trouble is it's not exactly "action packed"! :lol
.

And that was one of my shorter posts . . .

So you're saying it's the way I write that gets me ignored?

I should cultivate the art of the sound bite.

I completed one NaNoWriMo, several years ago, but got very discouraged during NaNoEdMo when I let people read what I'd written and they said it was completely implausible (and I'd modelled the whole story after real events in my own life!) and they said that one character didn't suffer enough consequences for her actions (let's see, her parents disowned her, her partner deserted her, she lost her home and car and ended up in prison for three years. What did they WANT me to do to her?!?)




I wish I'd have gotten to read it. I've been on a perseverative kick lately, reading everything can get my hands on about executive function.



Wow! I've been on his mailing list for at least three years and never guessed that he might be on the spectrum.



I'll have to go back and read his stuff again. Lately it's been coming into my e-mail and sitting un-read because I was never getting anythiing helpful to me out of his newsletters.



Right now I'm working on autobiographical autism stuff (not specifically an autobiography, but autobiographical, kind of in the way that Rudy Simone's "Aspergirls" has a lot of autobiographical material in it to help illustrate the points.) I can talk to you about my previous writing in a non-public way, but since I wrote it all under a pseudonym (in case it might harm future career prospects), I don't want to publically connect myself to it.



I know that's one of my big problems, too, because I had a beloved editor who would look at my articles, send them back to me, and say "I want this, but you have to cut down the backstory first." The first time she did that, I had to ask what backstory was! LOL. She was nice and explained and I edited and she loved it and published it. But it's been a consistent problem for me (even in creative non-fiction) with the backstory.

It's hard, sometimes, for me to know what the reader will be able to "get" and what is too far from the average person's experience for them to be able to "read between the lines" to understand. I think that may be a Theory of Mind thing.

This is apparently what happened to Randy Ingermanson. And for a long time he despaired.

Something I read in another place said that you shouldn't model fictional characters on real life people, or plot points on real events in your life, unless you exaggerate almost everything about them, because text/prose is like a curtain between the writer and the reader, and you have to make things larger than life for them to look "lifesize"/lifelike on the "other side"/to the reader. Which makes sense ...

A bit like acting maybe? It is artificial but looks realistic to the audience, a "natural" voice won't project far enough.

But maybe it's more that our experience/perception of life, the "story" we really live in, is surprisingly different from the "rational"/"realistic"/"lifelike" one ( according to the norms of our time ), that we are consciously/usually aware of, is in fact far darker, more bizarre/twisted and outsize ... and needs much "stronger/almost violent colours" and "bigger strokes" and "wilder perspectives" to portray it convincingly.


Well, I don't think that I had anything very helpful to say, apart from referencing Ingermanson maybe, and describing how he writes outlines and scenes etc, to get over his difficulties with organising the vast amounts of material etc.

It's just that I definitely understood the "lack of forward motion problem", ( interestingly one of the biggest writing forums on the net is called "forward motion"! ), and wanted to express my sympathy with and interest in her dilemma. So although someone else very nicely suggested that I draw lots to decide which plot idea to go with, ( another problem I'm having ) I felt a bit invisible when irishwhistle didn't respond to my post in any way. On the other hand I do know that "reply-behaviour" on WP is often rather unusual! :lol

I wondered whether some books and films are the way they are, ( like "Memento" by Christopher Nolan, for example ), precisely because of the writer having this sort of issue, in the same way as Van Gogh paintings look the way they do because of the difficulties that Van Gogh had painting "realistically" ( ... realistically that is only by the standards of his day, the "normal" style of realistic representation of his epoch ), ie. that some of the most creative, exciting, radical, original, and "great" pieces of art and writing may in fact be the result of struggling to find a way to overcome such obstacles as we have been describing.

I actually get the impression that a great many of the most interesting books and screenplays are written by people on or near the spectrum, because they describe my own sort of difficulties and thought-processes and so on so well, as if "from the inside".


I unsubscribed from his newsletter after just three days; it seemed like such useless waffly rubbish, but the original Snowflake Method and How to Write the Perfect Scene articles sound promising, if rather mechanical.

I really do think that a disproportionately large number of great/successful writers are on or near the spectrum, and that it was/is the struggle with the fundamentals of writing ( believable characters, dialogue, forward motion, etc ), which produced some of the most exciting stories, books, films ... since the dawn of civilisation.


Ok, thanks. I may pm you about it, because am interested in the possible writing career paths.


The thing is that some writers seem to have found creative, original and exciting ways to use this tendency to delve at length into backstory, like Nolan with "Memento", and in a sense the whole detective/crime genre, in that the story is devoted to finding out what led up to the opening scene. They turn the urge to look at past causes and their effects into a story in itself. Sherlock Holmes being one of the first and greatest "personifications" of this tendency to "look for backstory".

"Memento" even starts by saying about the protagonist ( with short term memory loss ) in the hotel room; "so I'm in a motel room, could be anywhere, what can I tell about how I got here from the room itself ... ?" etc etc etc. The whole brilliant story is based on not having the faintest idea how to construct a coherent forward moving story, is about how we are driven constantly to look for the geneaology of cause and effect to explain where we are, what we're doing, and the decisions we make about what to do next ... and exposing how unrelated to reality they actually often are ... .

I think that in fact there's every reason to think that being on or near the spectrum may be an excellent qualification for writing really good books ... we spend so much time and effort examining and analysing the way that we and others behave, in order to understand and deal with things, that we may, with the right point of view/framework/"brush technique"/angle/"take" on things have more intersting and exciting things to say about life than a lot of NTs.

Think about some of the greatest painters, El Greco, who painted everybody really thin and tall, because of an astigmatism ... and yet his paintings are great and treasured classics. .. And Jane Austen, an aspie if ever there was one, and Virginia Woolf, and so many others, whose very AS'ness fed and fertilised some of the most lasting and utterly penetrating writing about people.

The thing is to find the "voice"/angle/place/perspective to write with/from which may be highly "distorted"/bizarre but is interesting, like looking through a lens at something, from underwater, from a birds eye view, somewhere that is real, but gives a strange appearance to things ... the thing is to be honest and true and clear about that viewpoint, not try to disguise it, not try to make it look like the usual viewpoint.

:lol :lol :lol I'm trying to cheer myself up about this whole writing thing, because I have been feeling so discouraged/demoralised/hopeless about it this last couple of weeks!
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Nancy Kress wrote a brilliant short story about a girl who is autistic and who has been given a trial work placement remote controlling a robot searching for valuable mineral rocks on a deserted island, who stumbles on a guy from a shipwreck and has to relay the info to someone in authority, and her struggles with that communication, and her efforts to look after the shipwrecked man with food and fluids, etc. The robot is a perfect vehicule for portraying her view of the world.

So maybe could write a story from the point of view of someone blind, or deaf, or paralysed, who only sees or hears limited amounts of things, who can barely move around, who can only describe certain things. ... As the OP said in fact:

I read somewhere else that different writers do concentrate on certain things, like social mores and houses and clothes, for instance, and almost no dialogue ... and others who almost never describe people's appearance, ( Chandler? ) and so on.

It's part of what creates the distinctive atmosphere of their "worlds", and makes them memorable.

Emily Bronte and Salinger, are other examples of writers who wrote what can, and did in fact to begin with, seem like grossly distorted or strangely "narrow" versions of reality, criticised as "unrealistic", etc, but which have become classics. Anita Brookner is another whose books consist almost entirely of back story and a few miniature, arthritically slow developments into the future.

Maybe the thing is to concentrate on what know how to describe, on what one really really sees and hears, as if were underwater and all sound is distorted ... would it make sense for someone underwater to try and turn the sounds they hear into the above-water equivalent? Or for someone floating above the ground to try and describe things as if they were on the ground? ...

Doing that would produce something very "flat", two dimensional, or simply unconvincing, especially if they had never actually lived above water or on the ground.

Similarly someone with a poor sense of forward motion, someone who has trouble perceiving and taking into account the future beyond tomorrow or even today ... would probably do best to write from a point of view which accepted that, in which tomorrow is almost unimaginable/very blurred, in which things that happen do not seem very connected to what one has done, or in which the connections between things need to be laboriously, even painfully, established, traced out, ( as in "Memento" for example, again! ).

I think I write badly when I try to write as if I was normal, as if I see people "whole" and "rounded", as if I see clearly the connections between what I do today and what happens tomorrow, and so on, when I don't.

I think that a lot of the writers on or near the spectrum have got round many of the problems we have referred to by writing from one very particular point of view, with all the distortion of characters, events, environments, etc "simply" the result of that point of view, creating three-dimensionality by avoiding the traditional picture of "reality" which more "normal" writers may be able to achieve with their more "rounded" vision.

We can't hope to describe people and events in anything like a "normal" fashion", we can't pretend to present a traditional, "normal" portrait of the world, ( except in the most formulaic, mechanical and shallow way perhaps, as Ingermanson has done ), so we need to put down on paper only that which we really know/perceive of people and life, however weird and limited that is, because it is still REAL, and by describing it in all its bizarre, "elongated", strangely lit "truth" we may be able to write something real enough to be interesting and exciting.

So maybe write characters from an explicitly half blind, half deaf, half paralysed point of view, ( or the equivalent ) in which productive and sustained action on the part of other characters seems almost supernatural or enviable, menacing or miraculous to the main character, and people appear telepathic, for instance. :lol :lol :lol In which everybody else seems to be part of some gigantic conspiracy plotting against the MC, etc. ... Whatever our "real" experience and perception of the world and other people is ... rather than trying to present them as "normal" which I don't think many of us actually experience them as.

Other people have always seemed incredibly frighteningly mysterious and powerful to me, when I haven't been self-defensively labelling them as boring that is. If I try to write about other people as if they had the same powers as me/the MC they are doomed to seeming implausible, because I have never "seen" other people like that, or only a very few, those on or near the spectrum like me. Most people are dangerous, impenetrable, gifted with strange powers ( in "my reality" ).

Conan Doyle, writing from the POV of Dr Watson, could only describe one other person in a credible, "live" way, Holmes, ( the other characters are just "extras" ), and he has "superpowers"! And presented like that he is so convincing, so "alive", that when Conan Doyle killed him off the public rose up in protest and demanded his ressurrection! :lol

Still trying to cheer myself up! :lol still trying to convince myself that there is hope! Just got to get a clear handle on what my real "vision"/perception of the world is, and how to present it.
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I've completely lost my confidence for fiction writing. I come up with stories that I think will be great, I get really excited about it and get really obsessed with a story I'm working on, and then reach a point when I realise that it's not working. I have the ideas, but making characters that are believable seems practically impossible for me. I can make a character seem real if they are very like me, but for example if the character is someone like a confident career woman who spends her evenings going partying with her friends (who is the main character in one I'm trying to work on at the moment) then I just can't work out what she would be doing in her life or how she would react to something or what she would say. I'd be terribly embarrassed to show one of my stories to anyone, because even though I know I write very well and am confident my ideas are good I know my characters have no depth.

I remember reading that story several years ago, maybe even nearly a decade ago.



Reminds me a bit of the book by Paul Auster, ""Timbuktu" -- the story of a dying homeless man, as told by his dog.

I like your insights about writing from the fringes. It makes a lot of sense to me.

I always get muddled up with the words ''fiction'' and ''non-fiction'' and ''science-fiction'' (because I'm not very clever for an Aspie).

But I would love to write a realistic story, (with made up characters), about a family with 3 children, one with AS, one Autistic and one NT, and just write how they cope through their child and teenage years. It's a very interesting sort of story to write, because it's all relevent to real life, like TV soaps.

The trouble is, I plan to write a story about family life, but I find it hard to explain all the character's details, and it ends up sounding like a big biography - which is not what I wanted. I try getting tips from google about how to write a story, but it never gives me enough explanations. I'm good at english, but I still can't seem to get my story ideas right. Plus I always just use really easy words, because I have difficulty using hard words, and I also find it hard to use description.

For example, instead of writing something like the coldness wrapped itself around her as she shed a tear. She quivered and thought longingly of being with her best friend. The friend who shared her thoughts. The friend who was now gone, like a speckle of dust, I would just write something like she stood in the freezing cold, and almost cried. She was shivering, and thought about her best friend who she had lost.
It's so frustrating when boring words come rushing into your mind, making your stories sound boring and dull. I'd like harder words, to show the reader how the characters are really feeling. I suppose I just have to keep trying.

I get bored of writing about magic and fantasy. I would love to write about supernatural stuff, because that's so interesting, but they never seem scary enough when I write about it. But most of all, I just want to write about a family who face the same every-day problems as most families do.