As April is Autism Acceptance Month, I’m going to continue the theme with this week’s blog by delving into how to write diverse autistic characters.
1. Gender
In creating any character, we think about what serves the story best. Sadly, what often happens when autistic characters are created is they come from stereotypes society pictures an autistic individual looks like. This means that we are often depicted as male and can be prone to violence. I’ve seen that in two British Crime Dramas I’ve seen recently return to our screens on ITV.
I’m not saying you have to only write female autistic characters. That wouldn’t reflect where we are as a community. We are a mix, including those that don’t identify with being male or female. It says a lot about how much portrayal of autistic people is more male heavy when I got overly excited watching Channel 4’s Patience that had an autistic woman I could identify with helping the detectives solve their crimes. If you haven’t seen Patience, I would recommend it to see what different representation looks like, especially as the actress playing Patience is autistic herself and was able to feed her lived experience into her character.
2. Functioning Ability
If we think about it, this is likely an area where we as writers can get stuck. It’s only with lived experience can we realise that the ability as an autistic person to function day to day can differ to the different extremes. There may be days where we are able to use our executive functions and get through the day without incident. We can go to the shops and get food without being overwhelmed. We can go to work and not have a sensory overload. And we can get through our To Do list fairly easily.
Then there’s the days where any function we have is seriously diminished. Something in our routine may have gone out the window or we didn’t get all the sleep we needed so we’re running on empty. When we’re in a more emotionally distressed position, it makes us more susceptible to having sensory overloads, being overwhelmed and even have a complete shutdown. We may even not have the energy to get out of bed. We could even be somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.
When thinking about your character’s functioning ability, consider whether days when their ability to function could help move the story on in a way you’re not expecting. What if events didn’t make sense to them until in their inability to do more than snuggle under the covers they’re able to put the pieces together that allows them to process those events the following day?
3. Nonverbal to Chatterbox
Another part of autism that isn’t talked about much or represented much in media is the fact that not everyone is verbal. Yes, there are many of us that have been able to function enough we can talk, potentially to the point where we could have a conversation for hours about particular topics.
However, there are also many of us where the use of words just isn’t possible. We may be so contained in our own heads that the only way we can communicate is through noises or special tablets with programs on that allow us the ability to type out what we want to say so a computerised voice reads it out for us. We could communicate only through sign language, like Makaton or the sign language of that country so in my case it would be British Sign Language (BSL).
There may also be points between those two extremes that people are in, where they can use words but may have points where they are nonverbal. This may be because they are so overwhelmed that they can’t get words out. I’ve experienced this myself that once I’ve had a sensory overload, I’ve struggled with talking to others like I did before the overload.
4. Overwhelmed Reactions
Here, I’m talking about being so overwhelmed by a situation that there’s an expectation that autistic people lash out and hurt others. This was what I saw happening in the two British Crime Dramas I spoke about earlier. Both characters were male, overwhelmed in some regard and lashed out at other people. In one of the dramas, the male autistic person locked other students in the library trying to get answers as to what happened to his friend that was murdered.
What I need to say is that there are situations where we may try to push the stresses away when we are overwhelmed and if there are people trying to help us they could get caught in that behaviour. There is also the possibility that we could turn that overwhelmed behaviour in on ourselves so we could self-harm or even fall into tics of destructive behaviour like hitting our heads on walls or furniture.
Not everyone is like this. We may contain our emotions until we overload. This could mean we sob it out or have our own outlet for all the pent up emotions we’ve tried to contain. I’ve had experiences where I haven’t realised I got to the point of overwhelm until it has come out in tears or anger. This is known as Alexithymia, where we don’t have a full recognition of our emotional state until we hit that point of being unable to contain our emotions anymore. Everyone is different, but it’s important to know not everyone is aggressive when they hit that overwhelmed point.
I hope you found these tips useful in creating authentic autistic characters. If you have a question you’d like answered, do get in touch and I’ll do what I can to answer it for you. Happy writing!