I had poured so much of myself into my protagonist. When my agent called my character childish, naive, and vulnerable, I couldn’t help but feel she was calling me childish, naive, and vulnerable.
Tag: literature
[image: Book cover with a black background. At the top, large white text & then yellow text reads “Autistic Disturbances” then smaller yellow text reads, “Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe”. A large photo in the center features a storage rack with stacked cylinders, with different whimsical buttons on the lid of each cylinder White text below the graphic reads, “Julia Miele Rodas”. Smaller yellow text below reads, “Foreword by Melanie Yergeau”.] . Maxfield Sparrow unstrangemind.com Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe By Julia Miele Rodas, University of Michigan Press, 2018. “Autism has a particular language, one that has been extensively recognized, researched, and described by clinical theorists, literary scholars, and autism (self)advocates” Rodas writes in her groundbreaking book on Autistic poetics, Autistic Disturbances. Through discussing the features of Autistic voice and examining various novels, short stories, and even diagnostic literature through…
Elizabeth Bartmess elizabethbartmess.com This is a three-part series. Part I explores autistic interiority and neurology. Part II explores Diversity in Autistic Characteristics and Demographics. In Part I of this series, I talked about how good representation of autistic characters shows interiority—characters’ inner experiences and reasons for doing things—and how various aspects of autistic neurology affect our experiences, particularly sensory differences, language and speech differences, social skills and abilities, and our ability to strongly enjoy specific interests. I also briefly mentioned executive function, the usefulness of routines and structures, motor difficulties, and a few other common differences, plus some common co-conditions, and discussed how having these differences, and having to interact with others surrounding them, results in our developing skills and coming to new situations with particular expectations for what will happen. In Part II, I talked about variation among autistic people: we each have a particular constellation of neurological characteristics…
Elizabeth Bartmess elizabethbartmess.com This is a three-part series. Part I explores autistic interiority and neurology. Part III explores Setting, Plot, and Character Growth. In Part I, I talked about how neurological differences affect autistic people’s internal experiences and strategies, and how we change over time as a result. Today, I’ll talk about variation in autistic characteristics, in our and others’ relationship to our diagnosis (or lack of it), and variation in demographics, as well as how others’ perceptions of us influence how they treat us, and how we change in response. On Friday, I’ll bring everything together and add some thoughts and links to advice on writing autistic characters, along with a list of some common aspects of autistic experience that are underrepresented in fiction, plus a list of all the books and short stories I’ve mentioned. Even though autistic people have many things in common, we also vary a…
Elizabeth Bartmess elizabethbartmess.com This is a three-part series. Part II explores Diversity in Autistic Characteristics and Demographics. Part III explores Setting, Plot, and Character Growth. “A lot of writers and actors seem to be able to get their heads around what autism basically is, in terms of language, sensory, and social communication difficulties. But then it’s as if they don’t know, or can’t extrapolate to, the full range of experiences that autistic people actually live. That things have happened to us, and things have happened in certain ways for us all our lives, and those things have had consequences for who we become and who we are….[T]he autistic characters [readers and viewers] are used to seeing have no depth of experience. They are people without history.” —Chavisory, at Chavisory’s Notebook This series is about what autistic characters look like when they’re written well, when they have the depth of experience…