Ada Hoffmann on Autistic Characters and the “Neurotypical Gaze”
Rose Lemberg pointed me to this post by Ada Hoffmann: Note to people thinking of writing autistic characters.
“If you write a story where your character has no character traits except for impairments and behavioural issues, and where they take no actions not related to these issues (or to someone’s desire to “cure” them), you are presenting a distorted and objectified picture of autism. This goes double if you are writing from the autistic character’s point of view.”
Personally, I think it’s worth reading even if you’re not a writer and have no intention of ever writing an autistic character.
There’s a part of me that wants to write a much longer blog post here, talking about my son, about the character of Nicola Pallas in Libriomancer, about the need to listen when people tell you you’re portraying people like them in a one-dimensional way. But I worry that doing so would pull attention from Hoffmann’s piece, when my goal was to divert attention to that piece.
I’ll probably write that post one of these days. But for now, go. Read. Think. And write better.*
—
*”Write better” is advice I’d give to everyone, myself included, and wasn’t meant to suggest that you’re a bad writer.**
**Disclaimer written to try to avoid hurt feelings, and because footnotes are cool.
Sylvia Sybil
December 1, 2012 @ 4:00 pm
If it’s a short story, I’ll give it more leeway, because short stories tend to focus on a single plot thread no matter what that thread is. However, just as I always expect to see hints of a larger world happening off page, I do expect to see that the autistic person has other personality traits and is not defined solely by their disability, even if the story’s focus is narrow right now.
(I am autistic – specifically I have Asperger’s.)
Ferran
December 4, 2012 @ 4:47 pm
Isn’t that kind of the Bechdel test?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test]
Jim C. Hines
December 6, 2012 @ 7:59 am
Agreed – even in a short story, characters should have more than one dimension to their lives and personalities.
Judith
December 6, 2012 @ 9:03 pm
If one really understand autism there is a way to draw their characters as broadly as possible.Their inner life and self conversation can be far removed from reality because the mind blindness leaves them needing to constantly invent their own interpretaion about social and emotional interactions. They use intellect alone and lose the great benefit of intuition and subtle visual cues others use to navigate their way through life.
These are just a few of the word pictures an author can draw of a character with AS.
The developmental delays of autism means the character will be child-like and emotionally immature in romantic interactions.
In complex social/process problem solving areas the lack of executive functioning will possibly get them into a quandry unintentionally.
Their ability to mask their behaviours/difficulties in public will contrast with their dysfunction at home. This is where their real problems arise more strongly.
Sylvia Sybil
December 8, 2012 @ 6:48 pm
Well, no. You have basically missed the point of everything. All of it.
Autistic people, like myself, are not “removed from reality”, do not “use intellect alone”, and do not “lose great benefits”. We are especially not “child-like and emotionally immature”. Let me repeat: autistic adults are not children, and it is staggeringly rude and discriminatory to say so.
Your comment here is exactly how NOT to write autistic characters. It is incredibly offensive to real autistic people, such as myself. If you are genuinely interested in learning about autism and what it’s like to live being autistic, I would advise you to try listening to actual autistic people, instead of stereotypes made up by non-autistic people.
As a Real Autistic Person, the worst part of being autistic – the very, very worst part, that causes me the most pain and difficulty – is ignorant people spreading and acting on stereotypes, such as you did here. Being autistic is actually pretty great.
Xyzzy
December 12, 2012 @ 7:40 am
I’m new here and a tad late, but have to echo Sylvia as a fellow autistic woman. I could go on at length (and originally did) — however, I will simply say that it takes only a few minutes of reading online to discover a boatload of websites demonstrating & explaining clearly how you’re stereotyping our kind no less offensively than clueless statements like “all choices made by women are driven by their obsession with babies.”
I’m very grateful that my two autistic parents raised me to be proud of not being like most other people and taught me intuitively to do things the way I’m wired to, rather than trying to make me “mask” who or what I really am — learned the hard way that the only ‘reward’ for faking NT long-term is suicidal depression, enough said. (I’m also beyond delighted to discover an author that would link to anything that’s remotely as enlightened as what Ada Hoffmann wrote, doubly so after seeing the awesome “pose like a woman” fundraiser for a rare/little-known condition. Jim, you rock!)
Verwirrung
December 13, 2012 @ 12:51 pm
From the discussion, it sounds like the character Rikki in Christine Feehan’s Water Bound would also be at least partially off target. It was the first time I’ve encountered a lead character in a supernatural romance with an autism spectrum disorder… I’d be curious for an expert opinion.
Any recommendations for any books that have good portrayals of individuals with autism spectrum disorders? (DSM seems to have disowned the name Aspergers Syndrome – that’s a discussion in itself.)
The book that has impressed me the most so far is Elizabeth Moon’s Speed of Dark. It addresses the quandary of whether a treatment to become “neurotypical” is worth sacrificing the gifts/blessings of being unique. I know that a number of historical composers and artists faced neurological disorders and/or mental illnesses – synesthesia, bipolar, depression, hallucinations, etc. If they lived today, they would have faced a similar decision about taking medications that would mute their gifts.
I’m not trying to romanticize any of these conditions – medications for severe panic disorder and depression have led me to these same questions on a more humble scale…
Indywind
December 13, 2012 @ 2:01 pm
Verwirrung, Speed of Dark is the one I would’ve recommended for fiction. I also liked The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Though some folks on the spectrum have taken issue with the author’s portrayal of of the main character’s point of view, as long as one allows that no single character represents the whole of any group, it’s probably acceptable.
For nonfiction, more and more personal memoirs are becoming available. I personally enjoyed Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day, and of course Temple Grandin’s writings. Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robison was vivid and sort of darkly humorous; in contrast with Tammet’s milder and Grandin’s more analytical tones, it shows how folks on the autistic spectrum, like members of any other group, don’t all speak with the same voice, nor have identical life experiences.