Non-autistic people writing autisitic characters
They do it all the time and make a fortune from it. To wit: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. But it's okay, though. There are up and coming autistic writers out there (like me) so any writings about us is still good publicity.
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Arthur Conan Doyle made a VERY successful potentially autistic character. You may have heard of him - Sherlock Holmes.
It's not horrifyingly difficult for a sufficiently skilled author to create a character that is nothing like them. The real trick is making an autistic character who is not a Mary Sue, because we seem to trade off certain completely normal, near mandatory-for-survival skills for other, less common skills.
I don't really care as long as they do their research.
AshTrees, as far as I'm concerned, it's very much okay. I find that usually when (non-autistic) people write about autistic characters, they either already have someone close to them who's autistic, or they put at least a bit of effort into the research. I think an author who's introducing an autistic character into their story is up for a pretty interesting challenge, depending on how well-versed they are in the subject matter. But then, this goes for characters with any type of mental disorder (or characters with physical disorders and chronic diseases for that matter)
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The problem with NTs writing Autistic characters, is that they can only write them from the outside. They can describe what we look like and how we behave and how that appears to them, but that's all.
No matter how much "research" you do, you cannot accurately portray the internal experiences of a character being overwhelmed by sensory overload, or being pushed into meltdown, or living in a world in which one's emotions are either intensely passionate, or virtually nonexistent and in which concepts like "happiness" are essentially meaningless - unless you have lived it yourself
Just as I can write NT characters, but there are certain neurotypical thought processes I can never fully and convincingly describe from inside the character's mind because I've never experienced them and frankly, they baffle me.
@Azereiah: IMHO, the original Sherlock Holmes was not autistic. Autistic hypersensitivity may cause us to notice small things others don't, but it also distracts us from a great deal of what is to neurotypicals patently obvious. Also, I rather doubt that someone whose brain is already suffering from too much sensory input would find a drug like cocaine appealing (personally, I found it to be useless. Rather than the stimulating exhilaration NTs seemed to get from it, it had no effect on me whatsoever. Since I knew the source and it was not 'cut', I can only assume that was because I had lived in a highly stimulated sensory state for so long that the sensation the NTs were getting was already 'normal' for me). Sherlock, as portrayed on the TV show Elementary, OTOH, was addicted to heroin, which would make more sense - and they do portray him as very Aspergian in most of his behaviors.
Of course it's okay. People write about the opposite gender, they write about people who lived a thousand years ago, they write about aliens and elves and even sentient geometric figures.
However, as an amateur writer who is often bothered by the low quality of some of the writing that gets published, I still wish I could shake some of these writers and yell, "DO YOUR RESEARCH!"
If you're going to write about somebody with a mental illness, disorder, disability, or difference, you need to find out what it's like to be somebody with that trait. That doesn't just mean you go to the encyclopedia and skim the article about the condition. It means you go and read about the experiences of multiple people with that condition.
And just because your character has some diagnosis, doesn't mean you can turn them into a stereotype of that diagnosis. They have to be a realistic person. They have to have more traits than just "Character X has Condition Y". They have to drive the story. If they're a main character, or even more importantly if you're writing from a first-person perspective, they simply cannot be defined primarily by their disorder.
Disabled characters should be realistic people--neither objects of universal pity, nor inspirational success stories that are supposed to make the reader feel all warm and fuzzy. Randomly curing them or killing them should not constitute a plot resolution--not unless you want to deconstruct those cliches, anyway. I absolutely can't take you seriously as a writer if you use a disabled character as some kind of "proof" that your villain isn't all bad, or evidence that your hero is a saint. And if you use a survivable injury that will result in disability as an excuse for killing off a character, I'll probably throw the book against the wall and decide you have neither the balls to write about disability nor the imagination to conceive of it as an actual option. Disabled characters should not be cardboard cut-out plot devices, and if yours are, you need to go back to writing class, because you suck at writing.
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I find Curious Incident to be an interesting case as the author of that book flat out denies doing ANY research on Asperger's for his novel and was just going by assumption. It's ironic because it's on of my favorite (and creepily accurate potrayal of AS) even though some may disagree.
The vast majority of AS portrayals are usually just to portray them as nerds, which is pretty bland to me.
However, as an amateur writer who is often bothered by the low quality of some of the writing that gets published, I still wish I could shake some of these writers and yell, "DO YOUR RESEARCH!"
If you're going to write about somebody with a mental illness, disorder, disability, or difference, you need to find out what it's like to be somebody with that trait. That doesn't just mean you go to the encyclopedia and skim the article about the condition. It means you go and read about the experiences of multiple people with that condition.
And just because your character has some diagnosis, doesn't mean you can turn them into a stereotype of that diagnosis. They have to be a realistic person. They have to have more traits than just "Character X has Condition Y". They have to drive the story. If they're a main character, or even more importantly if you're writing from a first-person perspective, they simply cannot be defined primarily by their disorder.
Disabled characters should be realistic people--neither objects of universal pity, nor inspirational success stories that are supposed to make the reader feel all warm and fuzzy. Randomly curing them or killing them should not constitute a plot resolution--not unless you want to deconstruct those cliches, anyway. I absolutely can't take you seriously as a writer if you use a disabled character as some kind of "proof" that your villain isn't all bad, or evidence that your hero is a saint. And if you use a survivable injury that will result in disability as an excuse for killing off a character, I'll probably throw the book against the wall and decide you have neither the balls to write about disability nor the imagination to conceive of it as an actual option. Disabled characters should not be cardboard cut-out plot devices, and if yours are, you need to go back to writing class, because you suck at writing.
I think this is a very good post.
I don't like Curious Incident... and in fact would be quite embarrassed if someone exchanged glances between that book and my own behaviour.
In Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury though, a main character who would now probably be defined as severely autistic is present however, Benjy, and I find his place in the book is very thoughtful in every facet I can think of. His story was a very profound and moving one.
It's all halaal to me though, even many of the portrayals I'd dislike, although I haven't really read/watched around. Obviously most authors go for many characters that are to some extent autobiographical because they'll be the most convincing and well-done, but portraying autistic characters as an example of a huge mass of characters that are worlds away from the author's life and perspective is fine, as much as research and sensitivity is needed.
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