Writing While Autistic: Who Gets to Speak?

Ever since writing my previous Writing While Autistic post, I’ve been thinking about other ways in which my writing is affected by my neurodivergent status.

I’ve always struggled with dialogue, in the sense that I often end up with characters who would rather hang on the fringes of things, who don’t know how to express themselves fluently, whose anxiety ties their tongues and prevents them from engaging in the way that characters need to engage with each other in order for the story to be driven forward. This is a clear instance of “write what you know”: When I write characters that are close to my own heart/experiences, and are characters that I understand, this is what I end up with. I do not understand people who can fluently express themselves in any given situation, who can dominate and direct a conversation, who are not constantly afraid of how they will be viewed or whether they will transgress the ordinary turn-taking norms of conversation. When I am too deeply inside a character’s head, I then experience their world in the way I experience my world, entirely “mediated through how that scene/situation impacts on the character and how they make sense of it”.

On the other hand, what the recent weeks’ reflections have shown is that there is a style of writing in which I have no trouble at all writing characters who can speak to each other easily, in fully formed, well-developed, and distinct voices. What is this style? It is when I have an external narrator, telling about events that they are not a part of. It isn’t an omniscient narrator perspective, but a storyteller narrator perspective; these are the sorts of stories which, at least in their initial drafts, start off with a “here we all are around the campfire, let me tell you a story” setting, stories that start off “They say…” or “It has been told,” or even “Once upon a time.” The story is told through a person, not a god or an “above” sort of view, but it is always told by someone who is in some sense external, or removed, or remote from the events they are narrating. In a sense, this is also a way of experiencing events mediated through the way in which they impact on people, it’s just that the people they’re impacting on are not the person telling the story.

So, who gets to talk, in my stories? The ones who are able to talk easily are the ones who are not a part of things: They can stand on the fringes, observe, interpret, understand, communicate. But the ones who are in the middle, acting and being acted upon, trying to interpret, failing to understand — they are the ones who cannot communicate.

Art imitates life, life is expressed in art.