7 Ways Fiction Writing Can Benefit Autistic People EP 7

In this episode of Autistic POV, I share 7 ways writing fiction has been helpful to me. Some of these benefits go all the way back to childhood. I discovered others as I wrote my upcoming vampire novel (Trancing Miranda). I wanted to share this info because I think that other autistic people might find this way of looking at storytelling helpful. Having said that, please note—these are my own personal perks. Not all autistic writers will have the same experience and I would love to hear any differences that might pop up on your list!

Also, please note, these are interpersonal benefits that have nothing to do with building a business or making money.   

Check out my blog  at barbaragraver.substack.com. You can read the blog without signing up for the free subscription, but if you subscribe, you'll get articles and media via email PLUS updates on my vampire novel (including discounts and freebies)

If you like this content, please consider subscribing, liking, commenting or sharing—or all of the above!

And thank you for listening!!!

UPDATE: Regarding the blog name change. It seemed confusing to have the blog and podcast share a name, so I changed the blog name to Writing on the Spectrum!

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EPISODE 7 TRANSCRIPT:

If your podcast provider cuts off the transcript, you can see the full transcript for this episode at AutisticPOV.com

Welcome to Autistic POV. My name is Barbara Graver and I started this podcast to share a bit of my journey as a late diagnosed autistic. Hi everybody, this is Barbara Graver. Thank you for joining me today on Autistic POV. Today we're going to be talking about my personal experience with fiction writing

0:33

and some of the benefits of fiction writing that I've encountered that I think would probably carry over to a lot of autistic people. And I wanted to do this now because I'm going to be publishing my first vampire novel hopefully this month. I kind of hoped I could get the book out there before I did the podcast.

0:55

It didn't turn out that way and that's okay. And I'll talk a little bit more about the book as we go. But I just want to go over fiction writing and why I think it's a good process for a lot of autistic people. I'm not saying everyone needs to write stories.

1:13

Certainly if you don't feel called to do it, you shouldn't feel that it's a necessary process. But for anyone who feels that call to tell a story and to live in their imagination and to share their experience through story. I strongly encourage you to do it and in this episode I'm going to try to give you

1:34

a couple reasons why I think it's beneficial for a lot of autistic people. So I do want to start with a couple of updates and the first is that I renamed my blog again. I was calling it Writing After Dark which was nice but kind of generic. So I've changed it to autistic POV, like the podcast.

1:58

And the reason I did that is because I really want to focus on the intersection between autism and creativity. And I will write other posts, certainly. I'll do a few book reviews. I'll do... Some straight stuff just about autism, just like I do here. But I do want that to be a theme with it.

2:20

I don't want it just to be another blog on Substack about writing. I want it to be more specific. So that's my first update. And I'll include a link for the blog in the description, certainly. And my second update has to do with the memoir that I talked about in our last episode.

2:41

And if you remember in the last episode, which was on nonfiction writing and memoir writing and sharing our story and various ways of sharing our story across various platforms, I talked about how I'd written this memoir and it had ended up really being more about spirituality. than it was about autism. And I didn't think that was appropriate.

3:04

And I still don't. I still don't think that's appropriate. But just sharing my autism story just didn't feel like enough to me. I think it's partially because of my identity as an autistic person. It's very difficult for me to divide my identity and from the things that interest me. And it's funny because I've been watching Elementary.

3:28

It's a show that's on Amazon Prime and I really like it. It's not perfect, but I like it. And there was one scene where Sherlock and Watson were talking and Watson was saying how she needed more. She needed her own life. She needed her own space. And she said, your whole life is what you do.

3:48

And I'm not like that. And that was a fact of the show. That's a fact of his character. He relates to people through what he does. And that's pretty much all he knows. And that's pretty much all I know, too. And so writing an autism story independent of a special interest was a big, big problem for me.

4:09

And I just realized suddenly I picked the wrong special interest. Spirituality is not as much a factor in my life now as it was. And I've talked about this before. I'll talk about it maybe more. But it's not the factor in my life that it once was. After I got my diagnosis, I kind of got my answer.

4:27

And I stopped looking for it outside myself the way I did before. So spirituality was not a good fit. And I thought, what is, like, what is my, really my essential special interest? And my essential special interest is writing and creativity. So I am going to do, I'm going to do the memoir,

4:49

but it's going to be about autism and writing from my perspective. It's not just going to be about my life is autistic or autism and spirituality or whatever. That's the focus. And I'll share life experience in it, obviously, but still, that's the theme. That's the focus. That's what I want to talk about. So that's back on.

5:08

I just wanted to share that with you guys. So as far as our topic goes, Autism and storytelling is a really fascinating intersection for me personally, and I want to share a little bit about my experience with that and some of the reasons why storytelling or fiction writing is, I feel,

5:31

a really good activity for a lot of autistic people, or at least why it's been a really good activity for me. And I know you hear a lot online about writing and building a platform and making money and all that stuff, but I'm not going to talk about any of that. That's not even on my list.

5:52

So if it's on yours, you're going to have to look for a more neurotypical kind of approach because that's not what I'm looking at here. I'm looking at how writing fiction can help us in our heart or in our soul. I mean, that's what's important to me.

6:07

So I came out with seven reasons that I feel writing fiction has helped me. May not resonate for you, but I'm going to share them. And the first one is it serves as a refuge or escape. And that was my experience in childhood. I mean, that essentially was my childhood.

6:27

I spent a lot of time lost in fantasy. I would draw. I would draw books. from my different fantasies. I would write short stories as I got older and illustrate them and bind them into books and really go the whole way with that.

6:46

And that was my way of kind of processing a world that was really pretty antagonistic to me. Another way that I have found writing fiction to be really, really helpful is that it provides a way I could connect with others. And this, again, goes all the way back to childhood.

7:08

When I was a kid, I grew up in the 60s and 70s. I mentioned this before. But we didn't have all the stuff kids have now. We had to kind of make up our own worlds. And that's one thing I was good at. I was good at crafting those scenarios. And that actually gave me a way...

7:23

to interact with other children, kind of like Sherlock interacts with people through his detective work. I was able to interact with other kids for a time. It didn't last forever through that. And I think if we write stories now, there's still that potential to connect with other people through our fiction. I mean, they may not understand,

7:45

like if we're writing about dark themes like I do, like my vampire story is dark. It's not... It's not super explicit, it's not super violent, but it is dark. And I think that... It's kind of a double-edged sword because there are going to be a lot of people who kind of freak out about that stuff.

8:04

But I think there are a lot of people, too, who will be hopefully, hopefully with my story, I'm envisioning like, I don't know, I'm envisioning bad Amazon reviews at this point. But I think there is that potential for people to see something in your story that they identify with and to make connections through that.

8:25

And I think that's important. My third thing is using story as a form of emotional healing. And I think as autistics, given our unique neurobiology, we run afoul of social norms and relationships all the time. And that generates a lot of unresolved trauma.

8:46

A lot of it goes back to before we even had language for what was happening. And we carry that with us. And most of us carry that with us. And stories are a way to explore that stuff and to express it, to bring it on into the light, as Jung would advise, and to look at it.

9:07

And to reframe it. And I think that's something I was doing, honestly, as a little, little kid when I was still drawing my stories before I was even using text. I was reframing things that happened to me. I can see it now.

9:24

and I think we could still do that and like my story my vampire story it's called trancing Miranda should be out soon there's a lot of dark stuff in that there's trauma and codependency and addiction and violence and a lot of dark stuff but I'm reframing it and when we take things like that

9:48

things that people maybe condemned us for didn't understand at some point in our life or left us for or used against us or whatever happened we can express it in a story which is healthy in and of itself and then we can reframe it we could give it

10:05

the ending we want and there there's a power in that there's a real power in that i believe there is So that is point, let's see, one, two, three. I don't know why I didn't number them. That's number three. Number four is increased understanding of ourselves and others. And I think the way this works is as autistics,

10:27

as we are often, often told, we don't have theory of mind. We don't understand how other people think. And I think that's true to a degree, although some of us are quite insightful, I think. I see through people all the time, but

10:41

At the same time, I have no clue what they're talking about often, so it's a weird thing. But also we lack insight into ourselves. So in writing, we can look at the things that come out and we can ask ourselves, why am I writing about this? Why am I writing about somebody who's been rejected again?

11:02

Like, why am I writing about someone who's been hurt again? Why am I writing about someone who's addicted again? And those things aren't always like... They aren't always direct equivalencies. I mean, you might write about addiction, and I think Infinite Jest is a good example of this.

11:18

Just because you write about drug addiction or some kind of violent thing doesn't necessarily mean you've undergone it. And I don't think people should make that assumption because it can be symbolic. But the point is, we're exploring something that is a problem for us or is symbolic of a problem we have for a reason.

11:39

And as we do that in our writing, we can gain greater understanding of ourselves. And we can also gain, I think, greater understanding of other people. Because in my stories, for example... As I was told in critique, my characters were very, very flawed. They were very flawed. It upset some people. They were so flawed.

12:03

But what I was doing and what was helpful to me was I'm showing these imperfect, flawed people, and then I'm showing someone else's. forgiving them for that someone else understanding it someone else bringing them home and saying this is okay like to me that's really really powerful probably

12:24

because it doesn't really happen a lot in real life but you can make it happen in a story and I think that's important I think it's important thing to do I think it's a healthy thing to do when unfortunately some people won't get it there's not much

12:38

you could do about that I mean that's that's the flip side of writing that's always difficult And I think you could also get kind of on a deeper level, and this is my one, two, three, four, fifth point, I guess, like a deep, deep insight. And that, that almost goes into the realm of symbolism.

12:57

Like if you have a dream, say, you look at your dream and you say, okay, well, what's a house? Does a house represent me? Like what's a car? Does a car represent my journey? Like however, however, you think of your own personal symbolism and you could decipher your dream and what

13:15

your subconscious is trying to tell you through that method. And you can do the same exact thing with writing. That's what literary analysis does. And I love literary analysis. So, I mean, you can look at things like you could look at the structure, the story, you could look at

13:30

color you could look at description you could look at all the all those things in your story and learn something about your subconscious self you didn't know before just like when you analyze the dream and and I think that's worth doing it's kind

13:43

of funny because we do that with other people's work but we don't necessarily do it with our own and I think we should be doing it with our own you know the creative process is is a subconscious process very often and a lot of stuff comes out with that that's important

14:00

Another way, I think, and this I think is number six, is the improved sense of identity. Autistics are often told that they have, and I know that's true of me, I have a poor sense of internal coherence, like Sherlock on the show. Who is he if he's not a detective? He's not anything. And that's how I feel.

14:20

Who am I if I'm not a writer? And I'm not saying I don't have other roles. I mean, I have kids, adult kids. I have all my people in my life. I have other roles. But we're talking about who we are in an essential sense. Usually we identify with something very strongly. It could be a special interest.

14:42

And That's, that's not bad, but we also tend to have oftentimes a poor understanding of our life independent of that. Like our life is a narrative, like our life story. And I talked about this last time when we were talking about writing a memoir, that writing a memoir can help us nail that down, help us understand that,

15:02

help us arrive at meaning through our life narrative. And a story can do that, too, because it's like if you think of a dream, like all the characters in a dream are aspects of yourself, all the characters in a story are aspects of yourself, too. And whether you want to own that or not,

15:19

that's where they come from, unless you're really basing it on some external thing. So I think as you see what those characters do and how things play out and you construct the theme I mean I have a lot of trouble with arcs and themes but you

15:38

construct a theme ideally at least a bit of a theme and that can help you see well I'm a person who's like this character in this way and this is their arc and maybe this is my arc too, or maybe this is what I want for my arc, or maybe this is kind of who I am.

15:57

And so I think it can help with our sense of identity, not just identity as a writer, but identity as a person. And I think another thing is just plain doing it just to be creative, just to express yourself, just to have fun. And autistic creativity, I think I'm beginning to feel is very different from neurotypical creativity.

16:20

I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I'm not sure, and I mentioned this before, that we should be modeling our work off neurotypical work and standard genre expectations. And I think There's something to be said for embracing our own type of creativity and avoiding professional developmental editing, possibly even, and just putting out what we want to write.

16:46

I mean, that's what I did. My book, my vampire story, Trancing Miranda. It's my story. I put it through a critique. It was a difficult process. I'm glad I did it. It was helpful, but it was very, very difficult. Not everybody was nice.

17:01

And I think that I put it through beta reading, and one person just hated the ending. And she was right. I changed it. But I didn't change it a lot. It's still my story. And I want it to be my story. And even if people don't like it, I mean, even if people say,

17:18

This is not what a paranormal romance is supposed to be because it's not. It isn't. I'll admit that. It's a story I need to tell. And I think there's value in that. I mean, I think if there's value in any of this, there's value in that. And all of this, these are my seven things anyhow.

17:38

All of these things, and I could read through them, refuge or escape, connecting with others, emotional healing, increased understanding of ourselves and others, deep subconscious personal insight, improved sense of identity, creative self-expression slash autistic creativity. All of these things really, really open us up to criticism.

18:02

I mean, it makes us vulnerable because you're putting so much of yourself in there. You're not really filtering. When you write for these reasons, like when you write to market or when you write to fulfill genre expectations, there's a layer between you and that creative work. When you're writing to better connect with yourself and better understand yourself

18:24

and deal with shadow elements and express personal truths, you don't have that kind of armor. So when people, and they will, I mean, this is my first book I'm putting on Amazon. And I told myself, if people are really mean, I'm just going to take it off.

18:40

But even going through critique, like people could be really, really brutal. And it's hard, particularly like if people actually like do name calling, like they say, your character's a jerk or a creep or an idiot. Like it's very hard to absorb that when you're actually writing about yourself and you know it.

19:01

So all of these things, they make us very, very vulnerable. And most of us have kind of had that experience of being low hanging fruit for bullies all our lives. And it can be very triggering when people criticize our work because We're like Sherlock. They're criticizing our work. They're criticizing us. It's different. It's different for us.

19:23

And a lot of us have past experience with feeling shamed. And it's tough. It could be triggering. And it takes a lot of courage to put something out there. This is the first time I've done it. I mean, I've written hundreds of thousands of words over the course of my life, written multiple manuscripts.

19:41

And this is the first time I'm putting anything out there. And I'm kind of scared, but I decided to do it anyhow because I want other people to do it. I mean, that's my reason. I'm not putting it out there because I think it's going to make money. I know it's not going to make money.

19:56

I'm putting it out there because I want other autistic people to do this too. And the flip side of that is you don't have to. You don't have to do that. You could be like me. You could write all your life and write for yourself.

20:10

Write for none of the reasons on this list have anything to do with audience. None of them. You can write for yourself and reap all the benefits. There's no reason you have to put it out there if you don't want to. Nobody should feel like they have to. So that is it for this time.

20:29

I hope this is helpful. I hope it'll encourage you to write fiction, even if it doesn't encourage you to publish it. And I will be back probably. I'm still doing the podcast once a month for now because I just get overwhelmed if I try to do it more.

20:44

And fiction book, I hope it's going to come out before the end of the month. I'll... shoot an update out I guess through my newsletter so if you're interested sign up for that I'm gonna put it I think on Kindle Unlimited I'm not gonna make it

21:00

expensive I'm gonna offer it for free when I can I mean this is more proof of concept than trying to make a living as a writer and if you like the content please consider liking or following or subscribing or sharing or commenting or whatever you feel called to do or all of the above because that really,

21:21

really helps. It helps like with the algorithms and it just is really super encouraging to me. So that's it for this month. So until then, this is Barbara Graver of Autistic POV and thank you very much for listening.

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Theme music by the Caffeine Creek Band

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