Fiction written by people with autism?

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StuartN
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20 Dec 2014, 12:25 pm

I know of non-fiction and autobiographies written by people with autism. I have almost no fiction (novels or short stories etc) written by people who identify themselves as having autism, or written by people who are widely known to have a diagnosis of autism.
Do you know of any published works written by someone who describes him- or herself as having autism, or who has been publicly identified as having a diagnosis of autism?



LokiofSassgard
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20 Dec 2014, 3:06 pm

I write a lot of fiction stuff about autism, but it's not fully published or anything. :/ I also haven't written anything in two or three days because of my recent obsession right now.


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24 Dec 2014, 5:21 pm

Though I am still in college, I'm working on my books, from fiction to nonfiction. However, I haven't published anything because I am actually working on each one.


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07 Jun 2016, 5:02 pm

Why would authors advertise they were autistic? Wouldn't that cut back on sales?



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07 Jun 2016, 6:09 pm

i've been trying to get published.... 10+ years of rejection and i haven't given up!


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mr_bigmouth_502
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07 Jun 2016, 7:29 pm

Speaking from my own experience, I honestly think it would be tough for autistic writers to create believable characters with their own personalities, since we have trouble putting ourselves in other people's shoes. So far I've experimented with making a few characters, and they've mainly been Mary Sues. :P I did come up with another character who isn't like me, but I honestly don't know how I'd write him since I can't really seem to put myself in his headspace.


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07 Jun 2016, 7:39 pm

Quote:
Speaking from my own experience, I honestly think it would be tough for autistic writers to create believable characters with their own personalities, since we have trouble putting ourselves in other people's shoes


I write sci-fi/fantasy type stuff. Never tried to publish anything. I get around this issue by creating main characters who are outcasts in one way or another, and are also usually aliens or androids or some kind of magical being. Then I just give them my own f'ed up personality, and it fits them pretty well. :lol:



HighLlama
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07 Jun 2016, 9:26 pm

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:
Speaking from my own experience, I honestly think it would be tough for autistic writers to create believable characters with their own personalities, since we have trouble putting ourselves in other people's shoes. So far I've experimented with making a few characters, and they've mainly been Mary Sues. :P I did come up with another character who isn't like me, but I honestly don't know how I'd write him since I can't really seem to put myself in his headspace.


I think character has to be thought of in a different way. An autistic person could go beyond creating Mary Sues, but probably not by having the personality come directly through the character, as in Shakespeare or Chaucer.

Anyone enjoy Kafka or Pessoa? I know it can be pointless to "diagnose" posthumously, but they tend to put emotions into images and avoid displaying character as most writers would. Bruno Schulz is similar. I don't think this is coincidental.



mr_bigmouth_502
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08 Jun 2016, 2:11 am

YippySkippy wrote:
Quote:
Speaking from my own experience, I honestly think it would be tough for autistic writers to create believable characters with their own personalities, since we have trouble putting ourselves in other people's shoes


I write sci-fi/fantasy type stuff. Never tried to publish anything. I get around this issue by creating main characters who are outcasts in one way or another, and are also usually aliens or androids or some kind of magical being. Then I just give them my own f'ed up personality, and it fits them pretty well. :lol:

And therein lies the problem; most of the characters I've created resemble me in some way, and I don't know how I'd be able to write fleshed-out characters that aren't like me. Sure, I can create flat characters based on stereotypes, but that's lazy.


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08 Jun 2016, 2:43 am

I write and have posted my work online but never published it for money. I can make the characters anything I want them to be. But I like to put myself in a character and my own feelings in it and I have gotten comments from some readers that they can feel they are that character and the characters feel so real in it. People have assumed that every character is based on a real person or something or that all events are based on real life events. I must have done a good job with my imagination. Plus some of it is also based on fantasy. But I wish that people would just read my story than assuming that each character is based on someone in real life or each situation in the story and just enjoy the story without thinking about anything in it being based on anything. But I wonder if they do this with every book they read that's fiction. But yes I have put in autistic characters in my stories. I also put in OCD and anxiety and I put in a character that is a bit weird and seems disturbed emotionally. I also made up a school in my story where it's for kids who are too different to be normal but too normal to be different and it's like for kids with learning disabilities such as Asperger's, ADHD, specific learning disorders or different learning styles, and for kids who just can't be in a regular school for some reason so they need to be in a small school with small classes where the teacher can give them more attention. Also the school provides therapy for the kids. Plus they have kids there who have behavior issues or kids who suffered abuse or any trauma.

But I have ran into tough parts like when I wanted to put in gothic kids or when the OCD character in my story gets in trouble for drinking and driving because he was an alcoholic and I have had to do research for my story to try and make things more accurate. Plus knowing what is inappropriate or not to say makes it tough too so I do my best. I just put in things I know that are rude or not appropriate and have it be a social blunder the aspie character does.

I have also done some fanfiction I have put on the website fanfiction.net. I have came up with some crazy ideas for stories but never written them. But I have written some on there like what if sam was a bed wetter and another one where Benny wonders if Sam has Asperger's or not and I have done another one I never finished and it's about Gilbert and Arnie coming to Spokane and they meed Ruthie, Benny and Joon and my crazy idea is Sam and Gilbert look lot alike (same actor is why) and they decide to switch places to play a trick on Mike so Gilbert pretends to be Sam and Mike is surprised how much Sam had changed and is no longer a weirdo. But he calls Arnie a ret*d and Gilbert punches him in the face for it. Sadly I never got that far in the story. I also did the Asperger's one for South Park but then they aired an episode on it for real so that killed my interest in the story but I still left it up.

I am pretty creative when it comes to writing because I come up with all these ideas for my stories. I even came up with How Chloe got Dipstick and also came up with what if Roger and Anita didn't get married right away.


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League_Girl
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08 Jun 2016, 2:45 am

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:
YippySkippy wrote:
Quote:
Speaking from my own experience, I honestly think it would be tough for autistic writers to create believable characters with their own personalities, since we have trouble putting ourselves in other people's shoes


I write sci-fi/fantasy type stuff. Never tried to publish anything. I get around this issue by creating main characters who are outcasts in one way or another, and are also usually aliens or androids or some kind of magical being. Then I just give them my own f'ed up personality, and it fits them pretty well. :lol:

And therein lies the problem; most of the characters I've created resemble me in some way, and I don't know how I'd be able to write fleshed-out characters that aren't like me. Sure, I can create flat characters based on stereotypes, but that's lazy.


Or you can cheat and base characters off real people, lot of authors do that, same as for TV shows and movies. I have done it too.


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08 Jun 2016, 2:58 am

Gro Dahle. She was diagnosed after a couple of her children received a diagnosis. She says she rather regrets it being public knowledge now - particularly as journalists take her jokes deadly seriously.

She's originally known as a poet, with "A Hundred Thousand Hours" being the best known. She's written a lot of children's books, most of them illustrated by either her husband or her daughter, which generally keep very strongly to a child's perspective. A lot of these books tackle heavy topics such as violent or mentally ill parents. In her texts she uses a lot of repetition and a sing-song style.

Perhaps the most relatable for autistic people is "Snill" - I guess it would be called "Nice" in English. It's about a little girl called Lussi who is so nice and quiet that one day she disappears into the wallpaper, and nobody can find her.

Also, she's written a few novels. I read one of them "Blomsterhandlersken". It's about the midlife crisis of a woman who seems pretty aspie to me. She just published a short story collection, "America".

Picture and interview: http://www.forlagsliv.no/litteraturavde ... -a-skrive/
Try running it through Google Translate?


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08 Jun 2016, 3:19 am

Janet Frame, a prizewinning New Zealand novelist published a lot of fiction - novels, short stories - as well as poetry and three much acclaimed volumes of autobiography, and though Asperger's was unknown here for nearly all of her lifetime (and she was once misdiagnosed as ill with schizophrenia, and was due to be lobotomised. Just before this took place, a short story she had written and entered into a national competition won first prize. When the judges found out where she was, they rescued her). With their support she became established and independent. One of her many subsequent novels was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

It's more in her three volumes of auto-biography as she observes her own life - and she observes it like an outsider looking in, like a novelist - that you can so clearly see her as someone with both feet firmly planted on the spectrum.

My own favourite novel of hers is one called "Daughter Buffalo", though it is one of her less famous ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Frame



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08 Jun 2016, 3:36 am

B19 wrote:
Janet Frame, a prizewinning New Zealand novelist published a lot of fiction - novels, short stories - as well as poetry and three much acclaimed volumes of autobiography, and though Asperger's was unknown here for nearly all of her lifetime (and she was once misdiagnosed as ill with schizophrenia, and was due to be lobotomised. Just before this took place, a short story she had written and entered into a national competition won first prize. When the judges found out where she was, they rescued her). With their support she became established and independent. One of her many subsequent novels was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

It's more in her three volumes of auto-biography as she observes her own life - and she observes it like an outsider looking in, like a novelist - that you can so clearly see her as someone with both feet firmly planted on the spectrum.

My own favourite novel of hers is one called "Daughter Buffalo", though it is one of her less famous ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Frame


I never knew Janet Frame had Aspergers! She's one of the important writers of the last century.

Btw, I remember one interview where Gro Dahle mentioned that she's met a bunch of writers who seem to be on the spectrum. I've been wondering about this. I remember Elizabeth Wurtzel saying that a rather striking number of mental patients have ambitions to become famous writers - obviously a neurological condition does not a great writer make. However, I suppose that the writer's role allows for a lot of unusual behavior that would not be excused in for example a nurse. In a way, being a writer could be a perfect job for someone with ASD, as long as they can get around their executive functioning issues and not become completely isolated.

I've been listening to podcasts with famous writers, and I was very struck by something the Norwegian author Ingvar Ambjørnsen said: that people describe him as the voice of the eighties, yet he pretty much missed out on the eighties because he was sitting at his desk writing and drinking beer.


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08 Jun 2016, 4:41 am

I feel very sad about the way Frame's life was so disrupted by the misunderstandings of the time. After her death (as is mentioned in the Wiki bio), a doctor did write in the NZ Medical Journal that he thought she had Asperger's. To me it sticks out like the proverbial sore toe! At least for me she is a compelling example that ASD and fiction writing are not mutually exclusive.

Another famous and very literary writer I have my own suspicions about would be Iris Murdoch, also now deceased. Some critics have commented that her prize winning novel "The Sea The Sea" has some Asperger's undertones; I think a number of them do, and seem to me to be written with "insider" knowledge. Murdoch was also an academic who specialised in moral philosophy, and there is that subtype of philosophic "asp" I think - I have met them in real life. Murdoch had cats instead of children, also something I have noticed some female asps tend to do!



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08 Jun 2016, 5:41 am

Tolstoy, reading his selfportraying Levin, who is having difficulty reading and relating to others. "Tolstoy did not suffer from obvious signs of depression until middle age, but ... His inability to connect with people could place him on the autism ..."
Jane Austin, guess by the caracters she describes!
https://www.theguardian.com/books/books ... onalcharac
"And therein lies a clue as to why tales of alienation are now being interpreted as descriptions of autism. Alienation, while examining inner angst and existentialist crises, looks outward towards the individual's relationship with the world and society, however confining or crushing that society may be - Autism as a literary trope, in contrast, is about looking inwards and reducing our relationship with the world to our own unfathomable neurology. Such thinking ends in a muddle."
Bleak reasoning in this imho, autism was always around, contrairy to the retelling of history, and not clearly separated, by diagnostic standardizing, from the overall human presentation, maybe writers and autistics, by means of looking at interacting instead of being absorbed by interacting, could be intertwined more than societal correctness allows for.

Writers on the Spectrum: How Autism and Asperger Syndrome Have Influenced literary writing.