{"id":3012,"date":"2020-08-09T13:38:29","date_gmt":"2020-08-09T12:38:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/autisticnotweird.com\/?p=3012"},"modified":"2022-02-28T12:43:33","modified_gmt":"2022-02-28T12:43:33","slug":"writers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/autisticnotweird.com\/writers\/","title":{"rendered":"Twenty tips for aspiring writers, from an autistic novelist"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

One commonality I\u2019ve found among autistic people is that many of us love <\/em>creating our own universes.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The real world often functions without autistic people in mind. To many of us, it seems that the non-autistic population seems to be entirely in control \u2013 often, even in control of our world and our futures. So it can help enormously<\/em> for us to escape into a universe where we choose the rules, we can influence events, and nobody gets to cast our wishes aside.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

This was me, when I wrote the Underdogs<\/em> series<\/a>. \u00a0Way back in 2010 I wrote a series of novels about an almost mathematically unwinnable war, as a coping mechanism for my unemployment. Ten years on, two books out of four have been published via Unbound.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

[All links in this article open in new tabs, by the way. I don\u2019t like bookmarks falling out of my books, so I try not to let people lose their place online either.<\/em>]<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

For context (as I\u2019ll be mentioning it often to illustrate my points), Underdogs<\/em> is a series of neurodiverse dystopia novels. Me being an autistic writer, I figured it was time for a novel series where autistic\/neurodiverse characters got to be the actual heroes<\/em>, and not just tokenised or stereotyped characters. Here\u2019s the cover of book one, published in 2019:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Clicking the picture will take you to its Amazon UK page, but it’s across all Amazon sites (including Audible).<\/em><\/figcaption>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Although I originally became \u2018known\u2019 as a writer through Autistic Not Weird and its Facebook community<\/a>, these last couple of years have also seen me finding some success at fiction too. So I figured it would be useful to write twenty tips (with ten more for my Patreon supporters<\/a>) for other aspiring writers.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Before we begin: although I\u2019ve tailored this to be autism-specific in places, this advice doesn\u2019t just apply to autistic people<\/em>. I often get comments to the tune of \u201cthis is helpful to everyone, not just autistic people\u201d, and I have no complaints about that. After all, autistic people have a lot more in common with the general population than we\u2019re made to believe.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

So, off we go. As someone who started his journey by writing Sonic the Hedgehog fan-fiction for his younger cousins, and ended up with two published novels and counting, here\u2019s the best advice I can offer to you.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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1. Find your own methods, your own schedule, your own routine, your own everything.<\/strong><\/h1>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

If you were expecting this article to be a point-by-point list of how stories must <\/em>be written, it\u2019s not. And don\u2019t trust any article that says \u201call writers should use this specific method\u201d. We\u2019re too diverse for that.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

As an advocate and an educator (I teach maths and creative writing in a special school too), people ask me a lot about \u201cwhat works for autistic people\u201d \u2013 whether with jobs, teaching methods, or in this case writing advice.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

My answer is always the same: \u201cwhich<\/em> autistic person are we talking about?\u201d Because, you know, we\u2019re individual people.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

During this article I\u2019ll be telling you what helped me as an author. But remember that we\u2019re two different people. Use my methods precisely if they help. Adapt them slightly if it helps. Totally ignore them if it helps. You\u2019re the only person your methods need to make sense to.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

In terms of scheduling, for example, some authors advise that you should write every single day. Stephen King even writes on Christmas Day<\/a>. Others give specific daily word counts. Personally, that doesn\u2019t work for me. When I\u2019m writing a story I burn through it passionately in a month or two (albeit not every single day), and after the first draft is finished I edit <\/em>it each day.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Because, after a lot of experimenting, I found that this works for me as a person.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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2. There are many, many different ways to plan. Experiment around.<\/strong><\/h1>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

George R.R. Martin once said that some writers are \u201carchitects\u201d, and others are \u201cgardeners\u201d. Architects plan every single point of their stories in fine detail. Gardeners are more open to just seeing where the story takes them.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

GRRM himself is very much a gardener. The advantage in this is that his A Song of Ice and Fire<\/em> (Game of Thrones<\/em>) novels feature spectacular world-building and hundreds of characters. The disadvantage is that his world is now so huge and convoluted that he\u2019s struggling to draw it all together before his series ends.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The teenage me was an extreme<\/em> architect. Very rigid and inflexible in my planning but I knew exactly where I was going with it, and that helped in my early years of writing. (These days I\u2019m about 80% architect, 20% gardener. And that\u2019s the best balance for me personally.)<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

But how do you plan, specifically? Well in my case, I\u2019ve always had two MS Word documents per project: one for the actual story, and another for chapter-by-chapter planning.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Top: the planning document for Zero Hour \u2013 the third in my Sonic fan-fiction series \u2013written when I was 14. And Blade is a robot, by the way.<\/em>
Bottom: the planning document for a (much earlier) draft of Underdogs, 16 years later. If you\u2019ve read the book, you\u2019ll notice a few differences from the finished novel (e.g. Simon appearing in chapter 1, Thomas being a point-of-view character, Ewan\u2019s PDA being kept a mystery, Charlie\/Jack\/Lorraine being Chris\/Roy\/Eve\u2026 and two big early plot twists not existing at all.)<\/em><\/figcaption>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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3. Work out what motivates you, and keep it close.<\/strong><\/h1>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

If I had a dollar for everyone I knew who started writing a book, then lost motivation and stopped, I wouldn\u2019t be a millionaire because I don\u2019t have that many friends. But I could go out for a three-course meal.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

There are lots of reasons why people give up on a story. Often it\u2019s motivation, or being unsure of where their story\u2019s going\u2026 or worst of all, a combination of both. There are <\/em>ways to build motivation, and there are <\/em>ways of planning your way out of a hole, but it\u2019s bloody difficult to do both at once.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Often it\u2019s good to ask yourself: why do you want to write this story?<\/em> Re-familiarise yourself with what you loved about it enough to get as far as you did. Ask yourself whether you want to be looking back twenty years from now and wishing you\u2019d finished your book. Realise that the one thing Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens and every other published author have in common is that they all finished their stories<\/strong>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

But there are more personalised ways of finding motivation too. Want to know my geeky autistic motivation?<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I keep spreadsheets that chart my characters\u2019 appearances. I assign points to them- 4 if they\u2019re the point-of-view character, 3 for a major appearance, 2 for a minor appearance, and 1 for a mention but no appearance. It sounds silly, but during my worst moments of writer\u2019s block, one of the things keeping me going was the joy of filling in another column of the spreadsheet at the end!<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

And who cares if it\u2019s bizarre or nerdy as hell? Like I said, you are the only person your methods need to make sense to.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Here\u2019s one I made for my first ever \u201cserious\u201d novel (character names hidden because it could potentially get published one day). It shows appearances, points, allegiance, and when\/how characters die. Off-screen, there are names, ages, and even the date\/time that each chapter takes place.<\/em><\/figcaption>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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4. Characters are (almost) everything<\/strong><\/h1>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I remember reading Firestarter <\/em>by Stephen King, and being so bored halfway through that I nearly gave up. The reason I read on was a half-Cherokee assassin called John Rainbird. He had made some early appearances, scared the crap out of me, and vanished. I kept reading Firestarter <\/em>because of the promise that, sooner or later, John Rainbird would return. (And return he did. I was very<\/em> glad I kept reading.)<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Because of Firestarter<\/em>, I\u2019ve told countless students that a book with awesome characters and a boring storyline is much better than the other way round. Why? Because the reader needs to connect with a book to keep reading, and people usually connect with characters more than anything else. You could have the most energising, exciting, explosive storyline in the world, but if the reader doesn\u2019t value the characters going through it, why would they care what happens to them?<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

When the reviews for the first Underdogs<\/em> book came out, everyone seemed to love the characters more than the storyline. I guess it was to be expected, given that so much of the cast \u2013 and the readership \u2013 were autistic or otherwise neurodiverse.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Book two ended up being roughly as successful, despite it relying on people having already read the first. And I can guarantee that most readers came back to see more of the characters, not just more storyline.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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5. There are right ways and wrong ways to kill characters.<\/strong><\/h1>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The two most shocking events in TV drama in recent years have been The Red Wedding in Game of Thrones<\/em>, and Negan murdering a main character with a baseball bat in The Walking Dead<\/em>. In both cases, the fans were so horrified that the scenes became infamous even to people who didn\u2019t watch the shows.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

After the Red Wedding, Game of Thrones<\/em> became established as one of the greatest TV series ever made.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

After Negan\u2019s baseball bat, The Walking Dead<\/em>\u2019s viewership went from 17 million to 10.4 million in a month<\/a>. (SPOILERS BEHIND LINK)<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

So why do shocking deaths work in Game of Thrones<\/em> (or more specifically, A Song of Ice and Fire<\/em>) but not in The Walking Dead<\/em>? Because the Red Wedding drove the story forward.<\/strong> It had a purpose. Every major death in George R.R. Martin\u2019s series has a direct consequence: starting a war, ending a war, condemning another character to death.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The Walking Dead<\/em>\u2019s equivalent scene was widely seen as existing for shock value and little else.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Sure, deaths should shock. Deaths should make the reader swear at you in horrible ways \u2013 and believe me, I\u2019ve had people swearing at me as they read Underdogs<\/em> (which I probably deserved, especially after swearing at Suzanne Collins repeatedly while reading the Hunger Games <\/em>trilogy). But even the most shocking deaths are forgivable if they support the narrative.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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6. Write for yourself, not for a judging audience.<\/strong><\/h1>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

As autistic people, we\u2019re used to being on guard against the judgement of others. And it can massively affect our day to day performance. (My worst years were the ones when I tried to act as non-autistically as possible: not because I felt it would improve me, but in the hope that I\u2019d be judged less.)<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

But your story is your <\/em>universe, nobody else\u2019s. You don\u2019t need to sanitise your own creativity for fear of a theoretical reader. Just write the story you want to read.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

This is also the case for books you actually intend to publish. Yes, at some point you\u2019ll need to care about how your actual, real-life readers will react. But that\u2019s what the editing stage is for. If you write your first draft with fear-tinted spectacles, distracted by responses you may or may not get from people who may or may not read it, your story will be disadvantaged from the very start.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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7. Always ask yourself: \u201cwhy should my reader care?\u201d<\/strong><\/h1>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I don’t mean this in a negative way, of course.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Reading is an emotional experience. The books you\u2019ve loved most are the ones you felt an emotional investment in. The ones which you cared<\/em> about. I\u2019m not here to give a one-size-fits-all answer to the above question. But a few ideas include:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n