If I asked you what a Sensitivity Reader is, would you know? I’m also fairly certain that there are quite a few people who would think I’m here to berate people writing autistic characters, telling them off for their work, nitpicking and whinging “you can’t do that!”. Well, you’re wrong.
What Are We?
Whether you recognise us as Sensitivity Readers or Authenticity Readers, we are here to be somewhere you can touch base on a specific area that you’re writing about. This could be something involving a certain career like police so you check with someone on police procedure. It could be you have characters who are from the LGBTQ+ community (Drew Hubbard over at Pride Reads is really helpful for this community), so you ask someone from that community to help you avoid stereotypical characters. There are so many areas that I’d be here all week listing them all.
So, here I am as a Sensitivity Reader for autism. My role is to help writers or creatives who are creating autistic characters to avoid the stereotypical characters and make them as three dimensional as possible by using our lived experience. If you aren’t part of the community you’re writing about, we can ask questions about your character/s from the perspective of that community you may not have thought about. It could even help you delve deeper into your story once you have a deeper understanding of those characters.
What Do We Strive For?
Our hope is to bring something different to the portrayals of us in the media. Of the autism community, we’re having to fight against the assumption we’re all boys and men (I’m living proof this isn’t the case), we’re like Raymond in Rain Man or we’re only interested in our specialist subject like trains, dinosaurs or whatever topic you can come up with that seems more masculine. There aren’t many female representations, but that doesn’t mean you can’t write male ones. Just change it up and make it interesting.
So, if you’re writing a project with an autistic character in it, please reach out. Asking the question of how can you write these characters better is the start of making your work as diverse as possible. And from those I’ve talked to that are writing at the moment, being more diverse in your work isn’t a bad thing.