Writing Fiction

I had a friend at university who told me I was better at writing theory than writing the creative stuff. I knew I was a good critic, and good at analysing things. I thought I could be equally good at writing creatively, of course I didn’t know I was autistic at the time. I wonder now if I could ever be a good creative writer. Maybe I just needed to find a style that suited me.

I think the key to writing good fiction, to writing anything, is to really love what you’re writing about. With me, I was always trying to write something I thought would impress my teacher, or at the very least she would like. But that’s how I behaved in all areas of my life, I’ve spent my life trying to fit in. The idea of sitting down and writing a story I really wanted to write is a bit strange. I think you need to drop any pretences and intellectualism and think, what would I write if I wasn’t concerned with what others thought about me and I could just write what I wanted.

Unfortunately, at the moment, I’ve lost my passion for fiction. I don’t feel I have time for it, what with the amount of reading and writing I do around autism and self-development I feel I would be putting the brakes on my commitment to my growth, i.e. finding out about autism and how best I can function in this world, which at the moment is my most urgent task. But I’m like that; I tend to throw myself into something whole heartedly and everything else is banished to the side lines. I think it’s an autistic trait.

My mind is constantly making hypotheses and theories about the world and myself. This is how I spend much of my time thinking, even before I was diagnosed I had this same obsession to find out everything I could about my behaviour and other people; it was almost a necessity. I will not deny I am pretty much socially inept, but if I hadn’t had this ability to analysis people’s behaviour and to theorise about the world and how it works, I don’t think I’d have achieved nearly as much as I have.

I suppose if you are a natural writer of fiction you would spend your time dreaming of plots and story lines and characters. I day dream a lot, and even though other people appear in my day dreams, they are either mute, or saying things I want them to - because I don’t know what they would think or say in the situation I’m imagining. Maybe this is a skill I can practice through writing. I wonder if there have ever been any autistic authors of creative fiction. I did used to write a lot of poetry, but this was mostly just about myself and how I felt. Maybe that’s why poetry came easier to me.

The only thing I did well in fiction that other people enjoyed was the descriptions I gave. I always tried to make my descriptions as accurate and clear as possible and I think I achieved this. People on my creative writing course always said how real my descriptions felt. I think this is because when I’m reading I find it very difficult to visualise the scene the author is describing, so I always put a lot of effort into my descriptions. To make an effective description of a scene you need to come up with unique metaphors. Metaphors make people go ‘Ahhh!’ that’s what it’s like. You take their experience of everyday life and use it in a description of an experience they haven’t had, this makes it real to them.

But a scene needs characters in it that interact with each other. I think I was okay at describing characters. They never felt very real to me though, unless I was basing them on someone I actually knew, I found it difficult to create characters from scratch. I don’t know what other people thought of my characters. But even if I had an endless stream of real characters to chose from I couldn’t predict how my characters would react to each other. At the time I didn’t even realise it was something I should be trying to do.

My plots therefore where guided by events, and people where usually victims of events rather than controllers of events. My plots weren’t people driven. I think this is why I was such a fan of Thomas Hardy. People describe his characters as victims of fate, there is always a sense of something larger outside of the character’s power that directs their life. Also I was a fan of Virginia Woolf, I love her descriptions of people and places, she takes a microscope to the world and can spend a whole novel just writing about one day. She is more focused on individual psychology than how the characters interact. When I first started writing I tried to copy her style, I wanted to write a novel like Mrs Dalloway. It was years ago now, when I was first at university.

I can’t remember when I stopped writing fiction or why. I used to dream when I was younger that I would be a published novelist, but now I’ve lost my enthusiasm and motivation, I guess because I tried for so long without getting anywhere. With what I know about autism, and the things I should be doing with characters I probably stand a better chance now of writing something that works. Maybe I will, when I’ve got my life on an even keel and I’m more relaxed and feel that I have the time. It would be nice to see if I could do it now with what I’ve learnt.