Writing as a Neurodiverse Author

The key thing that often hits me with neurodiverse writing is distance.

I didn’t connect with the character’s voice.

There felt like there was something missing.

I just felt like I didn’t understand them or why I should care – or keep reading.

Hands up if you’re a neurodiverse writer who’s heard that one before?

It took me quite a while to understand that not just in my own work, but working on honing my craft as a writer so I wasn’t just telling. I worked so hard at show that the complaints turned around.

This is too intense – too much happening at once.

I felt quite overwhelmed with senses, can we pull back?

This all felt far too urgent and like I couldn’t breathe.

What did I do “wrong”?

Nothing.

I’d gone from one extreme to another and it was hard to find some kind of middle ground not just for my characters but for me. Because when you start editing your words to eliminate ordinary problems like show and don’t tell, you start to ask yourself if you are losing your own sense of voice too.

One of the things that came about from me thinking about this at 4am on a weekday night, agonizing over what thing to “fix” is that there is a very large difference between several core parts of writing for the neurodiverse mind to untangle;

• Removing authentic neurodiverse voice from justified constructive criticism
• Pretending there is a definite line between a neurotypical and neurodiverse voice
• Identifying that emotional capacity affects how involved a scene is
• Deconstructing passionate love of an idea to a novel that can relay that emotion
• Being aware of the emotional unavailability that detracts from a scene

If you think all these sound freaking hard, they are. And I still can’t do it perfectly.

I’d add in emotional scenes to relay how characters were feeling and they were flat, even when I was doing my best to show, and part of that was establishing character arcs better, by being challenged by a friend as to the why?

• Why did the character respond that way?
• What motivation drives their actions?
• What “decisions” a character makes are the plot, and not their own?
• Why do the think and act and behave in the manner that they do?
• Why should we, as the reader, care that they think that?

Why became one of the strings that helped unravel my understanding of emotion and voice. I started to read very widely across a multitude of genres, not just for my grad cert or tiktok recommends, but because the idea of “voice” was some elusive sprite I kept hearing was important and not understanding.

One of the first things I came across is the abundance of neurodiverse writing that is so distinctly third person. While I’ve read neurodiverse first person I often found it a lot more challenging. More triggering. Writing first person felt often times too intimate, too much, and I couldn’t work on a novel in first person. But then there is a growing wave of first person perspectives because of the reader demand to be as close to the characters as possible. They wanted that intimate sense of not just reading about it but feeling it too, this was the thing I was looking for, but as I worked through my grad cert, I learned more about the importance of narrative voice.

What do I mean by that?

Narrative voice is not the author, it is the character perspective of the story. It is what the author thinks they sound like, what they know and see, versus an external perspective. The external doesn’t know the thoughts or emotions unless they are shown, via actions and expressions and spoken words. This is where the fundamental components of show matter. But what also matters is the character or narrator’s ability to see it and this is where head hopping and point of view matter so much. It’s what helps create tension and relatability but also realness. We don’t know what’s going on inside the average person’s head.

What we do know is that there is so much going on inside a neurodiverse person’s head at any one time that extracting a narrative voice of a character authentic to that character is difficult to pin down. On top of that, the emotional connection the author builds to the narrative voice is compounded by their own sense of fellow feeling – the empathy that ends up leaving a writer unable to emotionally process the difficulties of what they want their characters to face, grief, anger, horror.

So when the words flow they do so in a torrent and when it comes time to constructively edit the emotion is that much harder to be removed from the author so they can refine the narrative voice to make it relatable to a neurotypical reader – or even just other neurodiverse readers.

How do I help you with this? What can I do that is going to make this easier on you?

1. I have learnt that if I want to make a story marketable to neurotypical audiences I need to write a rush draft first, put all the emotion into the scenes I want, and then put it aside for a while. That means when I come back to it, I can untangle the plot, work on character development, but ask myself the reason behind those emotional scenes – was it just something I needed to express or is it important to the story? I’ve come to learn that using less of these heightens the ones I leave behind and while I difficult decision, makes the story stronger.
2. I don’t worry about emotional descriptions, such as people “looking sad” as opposed to “grief haunted his eyes” until revising BUT I do put in the why of emotion at the time I am feeling it to remind myself what was going through my head when I write that scene. What made it painful for me, and was it truly the character’s pain – or my own sense of self-expression?
3. Not be afraid of acknowledging that I put a lot of myself in these stories, so while I might be trying to write a neurotypical voice, not someone intentionally autistic, that in many ways I will never be able to do that because I’m not neurotypical. No amount of copying or evoking or reading is going to enable me to do that – and that’s OK.
4. That there needs to be something beyond having the book go viral on social media, have it adored by everyone after all that hard work. Because this is hard work, it’s a lot of work and no one wants to do this much work on a task that is laborious in nature. No one wants to revise the story over and over again – so having a reason to make it as good as possible should be the drive that keeps you focused, to have someone see it the way you see it, the way you intended it to be.

This may end up meaning that stories you love, that readers love, are put aside for a while because they aren’t going anywhere. They aren’t ready yet, or you aren’t ready as a writer to write them to the capacity that they deserve.

It may mean that you get halfway through a story draft only to see that you don’t love it enough to do that amount of work on it. I understand that no one likes editing but in many respects for someone with so much noise in my head it physically hurts sometimes that unwinding the narrative voice, the emotion, the story from my own hurts and loves is sometimes impossible.

And that makes me sad. That I won’t be able to relate that story to someone with the same sense of wonder. The same love. But what I have come to acknowledge is that these hurdles don’t make me love these stories any less, they don’t make me not want to work on them, or think they aren’t deserving of that work. Some stories just need to wait until you and the story are ready to see what it can become.