About six months ago, I was sitting in the waiting room of my therapist's office. She was a member of a large mental health practice. Seated in the middle of the floor was a young woman, say 16 or so, who was rocking back and forth, and repeatedly picking at her T-shirt. Her eyes were closed, or nearly so. I watched her closely. Nearby, seated in chairs, were a man and a woman, whom I believe were her parents. They glared at me. I smiled back, and returned to observing the young girl, consciously putting on the kindest expression I could muster on my face. The parents seemed to relax, understanding (I hope) that I was not watching the girl because I thought she was a freak, but because I thought she was a human being - a person I wanted to understand. Inside that girl is a spirit, the same as mine. Inside her is a mind, one that works differently from mine, but probably not all that differently. When I went in to speak with my therapist, I immediately told her what I had seen in the waiting room. She told me, as I suspected, that the young lady was autistic.
I am a writer. As such, I am fascinated by people, and the stories of each person. As time has passed, I have tried to educate myself about autism. I learned a lot from Temple Grandin. Her words have opened up a whole world to me, given me a new and different way to see the world, and to view my own experience of it. And so I would like to write a story with the main character being autistic.
I need a lot of help. I need to deconstruct my own world view, and reconstruct one that is consistent with autism. Of course that is very hard, as autism is not one thing, but rather (1) a group of behaviors identified by professionals, and (2) a way of experiencing life and the world as a primary subject, which one or several of the aformentioned professionals has identified as autistic.
So I hope I can establish a dialogue, ask some questions, and hopefully not be regarded negatively. With the help of the good people in this virtual community, I may be able to craft a really good story that helps the world-at-large understand the world inside that young lady who so fascinated me. That world has value. I could feel it.
I love the thing about the disabled dog. It made me laugh out loud!
Let me explain a little more about my post.
Stephen King said about how his stories arise that they all started with "What if...?"
My "What if...?" is this: What if someone won the Powerball Lottery four times in a row, and saved the earth from destruction by predicting the orbit of an asteroid, because that person had an extraordinary sense of numbers? That person would be wide open to hatred out of envy, and then adulation for saving the world.
Just as Stephen King, or any good writer, is able to get inside a character, and make people care about that person, so I need to get this character right.
When I was growing up in the 50's and early 60's, the words "spastic" and "***" were diagnoses. We never, ever, as children, saw a person in a wheelchair in school.
This grew out of a deep cultural bias against anyone with a physical or mental difference from "normalcy". The dominant notion was that if a person was physically imperfect, they were morally imperfect. That bias stretches back to antiquity.
Things are better today. But there is still a long way to go.
One thing is certain. The more people find out about each other - how much we are alike, the better we are able to not just tolerate, but appreciate the differences.
In reading posts on this board, I have found that many autistics have come to the same sin as NT's. Face it, the world is a mean place. For everybody.
The only help we have in this mean, mean place is from each other. Labels and biases keep us from joining hands in an effort to survive and flourish.
So I ask my first specific question.
How would an autistic person know whether or not his/her parents loved them?
...is that if you're writing fiction in the hopes of making money, you're in the wrong business. I write because I love creating characters and having them tell their stories to me. So the remark about making my living made me chuckle. And as for making autistic people look bad, in all my writing, I try to make characters as real as possible. How do I know if they are real? They start to talk and act "on their own". In other words, the story surprises me. It may not go where I thought it would go. It doesn't make any difference if a character is autistic, anymore than if she's a redhead. My basic assumption is that people are all pretty much alike in their capacity for emotion. The reason we care about characters in fiction, and each other in reality, is our sense that we are all alike on a basic level.
As for winning the lottery, and randomness.... I majored in physics in university. I have been fascinated by randomness since I came across a table of random numbers in the CRC Math Handbook. I could go on and on about randomness. But the basic fact is this: a random sequence of numbers has no discernable pattern. The key word is discernable.
How that figures into the story... well, just wait and see!
By the way, I live in a household with a seven year old boy diagnosed with Asperger's. I love him a lot. I'm sitting talking with his mom about his educational program right now.
Meanwhile, I am here doing research on how autistic people deal with emotion and emotional communication.
Dear Darkcode,
That's the question... But as an NT, I can make a good guess. The question I am all about here is emotional communication. Since it's tough for enough for me to figure out emotional states of others, I wonder how it is for someone who hasn't my ability to discern the semantic of body language and tone of voice.
As for being a professional writer, or a student... I could cite experience, but that's not the point. That I don't know stuff, shoot, I don't even know what I don't know! Finding stuff out is what get's me out of bed in the AM!
Dear M,
Nope. I am just a writer. Not that I haven't read my share of horror yarns.
My last completed work is a screenplay adapted from a novel "The Awakening" by Kate Chopin. It is currently in development by a production company.
As for your statement about trust... That's good. Can you tell me more about how that trust comes to be?
One of the things I've seen with Marshall, the 7-year old with Asperger's that I live with, is that his mom, who is great, talks to him a lot, and explains in words what she is feeling, and what others may feel. So it seems to me that she is decoding the emotional communications for him. I might note that he seems to have no trouble expressing his emotions. And too, friendly appropriate touch (patting) gets through to him just fine.
One of the "symptoms" of autism is that a child does not seem to respond to expressions of maternal affection as expected.
Now I'm guessing that a good analogy would be, say, red-green color blindness, to smile-frown expression blindness. In the case of color blindness, if I am expected to respond to traffic lights innately, and I run a red light, I could get a ticket, or even killed. But if I learn that the light on top means stop, and the one on the bottom means go, I'm cool. So I'm not keying my response to color, but rather position.
In red-green color blindness, both colors look gray. At least that is my understanding. So in the case of smile-frown blindness, what do those expressions look like? What is the alternative key?
Am I making any sense? Am I even close?
So if it doesn't "mean" anything, does that imply that you do not feel the need to be loved? What about touch?
When I started writing this story, I imagined the mom's emotional point of view. She felt abandoned by her child, since the child did not give her the responses she expected, that she needed.
Where I got stuck was the child's emotional point of view.
I wonder about this: suppose I can't hear any sounds below 20 kHz, but I can hear fine above that frequency. Could I hear my own voice? How could I speak to others?
Whoa. Part of understanding austistics is understanding that a lot of things are not said or written by us to be nasty. I think you're taking Guest's statement the wrong way, and too personally. We usually approach things from a more logical, rather than emotional standpoint. (If I may speak for 'Us'.) We're often shocked when what we says produces a flareup in a non-autistic.
I like that Mencken quote.
Yeah, V, I think you're trying too hard to be how you think we are. Just be yourself. I had great Geek NT friends in high school (maybe one was AS, if I think about it). A rose and a cabbage have value, Autistics and Non-Autistics have value. Everyone is only who they are really as individuals anyway.
Gareth--unless someone is asexual, but can they really be--with sex organs?
Can we really be completely unbiased? V, you use the words, 'wacky' and 'odd' --- aren't these terms that are subjective, subject to the person defining what is wacky or odd? The shoelace thing is a perfect example. Odd to one, logical to another. I was upset to learn that Rain Man was supposed to be an autistic, I thought he was *** with a 'savant' ability. How would someone who is '***' view my statement and my point of view? Or an autistic for whom I labeled as just having nothing in their head except their 'savant' ability? (Of course, I could blame this on the ones who made and acted in the movie for not portraying a person correctly, and instead making a facetless stereotype.)
Amy, in case V doesn't answer, I'll try and give an answer: they're metaphors. Writers are always thinking in hypothetical stories or symbols. The one about the asteroid is saying, imagine what someone could do if they had a special ability. Picture someone saving the world because of their ability. It's the idea of someone saving the world because of a special ability that's important but a fictional story to convey the idea is the writer's way.
The tree thing is to illustrate the fact that a story has to have conflict, something bad or a problem happen to the hero or it's boring. If he does the same thing every day with nothing happening, no one wants to read it. I'm sure someone can answer this better than me, but it seems that people want to have their emotions engaged--shock, horror, sympathy, maybe have the main character go on a journey or accomplishes something--interest, excitement, and then have the situation resolved with a good ending--relief, happiness. You set up the character so he's likable, make something bad happen to him (he has to run up a tree), he goes on a journey or accomplishes something (he catches a rock), resolution (he comes down from the tree). A complete story.
Amy, look at it this way: NTs sometimes need a made-up story to get a point across. You can tell them something in a logical way and they don't get it or they get it but their emotions are not engaged so they don't care. If you put it in story form, they get it and are engaged. If you say: an autistic guy with an ability with numbers could help the world be a better place, many people wouldn't listen, wouldn't get it or wouldn't care. But if you make up a story about an autistic guy and you give him a personality and make him real to the reader and have him do something wonderful (though unlikely), people will listen and come to have some understanding and compassion for this guy (even though he's not real, but he's a symbol of a real person). I think the problem is that if V doesn't get it right it will be another Rain Man and people will come away with the wrong ideas, yet again.
Is the father supposed to be Asperger's. cause that character sounds like one.
I am beginning to see that metaphor is not a good way at all to try to say something on this board.
That's not fair. We know little about your story.we don't even know what genre is. for a comedy or a children book, having the protaganist save the earth would be be an acceptable plot device. for a drama it would be absurd.
The story is not really all about autism. It's about randomness. I need a vehicle (character) that can see pattern where others don't. I could have a character get hit in the head with a hammer as a child. See "The Dead Zone" by Stephen King. Child suffers head trauma, turns into political assassin. Great story.
That's too bad. Austism is the focus of many conflicts within the home and without (look around this site for one of them). Lot of material for a enterprising author interested in the subject. :wink:
Now you can all beat me up for using autism as a means to my story-telling end. But there are models out there that say that we are all savants, but something gets in the way in the case of NT's, while autistics do not develop this obstacle. I find that interesting.
A lot of NT's are overfocused on Savantism IMO. It might be just positive thinking. but it might just be glossing over the difficultities Autism brings. I do not believe that the classic notion of a savant implies creativity though. for example though the savent pianist may be able to play mozart by ear they may not be able to compose new music. The problem I have with this I think it can be apply to any ability of an autistic or aspie diminishing that ablity to a quirk of our disability.
I am curious as to what the main conflict of the story is?
I don't know that Rain Man really caused people to come away with the wrong ideas. It seemed to me that there was a bit more going on in the family than just Rain Man having autistic savantism.
His brother and father also showed signs of autism - possibly HFA or Aspergers. They both seemed hyperfocused on certain subjects and had difficulties in expressing emotions.
That's fine. I also wondered if their dad had Aspie traits as he seemed to have a lot of trouble showing the boys affection, particularly the younger one. He was also very interested in his rose bushes and his car. I can't remember what happened to their mother or if much was said about her personality.