You know what I think is disingenuous? Going back to your first post where you quoted me and adding all of this - all of this that clarifies your statements, that fills in the gaps that I asked about, and make it look like I'm the one who can't read. That's disingenuous.
I'm sorry you didn't see it, but you're determined to bite my head off so I'll just shut the fuck up and do better to read you mind in future.
Okay, then there was a delay on my end, because when I went back up (after I posted my second response to you) those parts were missing.
Right. Because you assume I'm saying things I'm not saying, call me out on them (but apparently are not disagreeing?), and I'm the one who should apologize when the site lagged for me. Definitely. *Don't worry mods - I'm done.
@LostThePlot -- I never said the author shouldn't mention or be part of the story. Of course a character having autism can affect the story. I was just saying it didn't have to be THE STORY. An autistic character's story about living and coping with autism has probably been done a million time. I was suggesting someone be a little more original.
Yay, I don't need to post a train meme. To the OP: I think the best way to go about it is simply read on autism and how it affects a person's behavior, then decide on where in the spectrum your character is, identify prevalent traits, and then just write, write and write. When you're done, perhaps someone who is in the spectrum could beta-read it for you and give feedback. Then you go back and write some more!
Well that's been pointed out to me now; I took you saying "tell a story about anything else" to mean you meant tell a story that doesn't include autism which, for the record, would be tokenism.
Dear lord.... he never said that. No one ever said that. Anywhere. *Seriously, I promise I'm done now. I'm taking it off my watchlist and I won't respond anymore. Promise.
How wrong do you want me to say I was? Like, for real. What do you want from me here? I said you were right, I said I took the wrong meaning. Seriously, how determined are you to make me feel like an asshole?
I think that the issue is in part with the meaning of the word "about." If I write a murder mystery about an autistic detective, the story is "about" the murder. The autism may strongly affect all sorts of elements of the story, but it's not "about" autism.
Right. But amongst the other subjects it mentions one would hope that the lead character's perceptions of the world would be something that's crop up there somewhere.
Why do you want the character to be autistic? I have written a handful of autistic characters over the years but it was not something I ever really set out to do. Rather it was something I came to realise about them after I fell into a position working with people around my own age on the spectrum. It was after noticing certain traits that my characters possessed come up again and again in the people I was working with that I did some research and basically played connect the dots. It was at that point I started to hone it on it more specifically and went back to those stories in attempt to make those characters feel more relatable. I focused my research mostly on sources written by people with autism because, hey, who better to ask?
Does the person have to be diagnosed with autism? Most people who have mild forms of it aren't, there is no reason for it. Detective-like characters with some form of autism is certainly not uncommon (Dr House pretty clearly had Aspergers, and it was mentioned multiple times in the show.) Sherlock Holmes is also widely considered to have some form of mental illness, also usually attributed to Aspergers (which would not be discovered until 40 years after the character was written.)
That's actually kind of my experience, too. I wrote several autistic characters without realizing what I was doing, and then once I did realize it was a big "oh, well obviously" moment And once I knew what I was doing I figured I should do it right, so then came the research and some very slight character editing to keep things in line. It's fun/weird how you can internalize things like that and have them come out in your writing without you even catching on for a while.
I don't agree that House is a clear portrayal of aspergers at all. If anything, he seems to be a sociopath in that he seems to harm people with intent and with no care for them, or perhaps an attachment disorder in that he can't get close to people, or he has an anger issue due to his injured leg and he takes that out on everyone. Or all of the above. But nothing in the portrayal of his character suggests to me that he is on the autistic spectrum; he seems to know exactly what he is doing. If that is true, then the writers have really fucked up.
House is, IIRC, explicitly based on Sherlock Holmes. His only care is for solving the problem; he doesn't give a shit whether the patient gets better or not except as proof of that. I don't know enough about the autism spectrum to know how well that fits, but most of his non-medical interactions seem geared to treating human behavior as a problem to be solved, not something to participate in.
