Realism vs. believability

And here's a post about my novel, now that I've gotten to the end (at 182 pages) and am in the editing phase. Or rather, it isn't a post about my novel, per se, but about one aspect of being an autistic writer.

When writing fiction, it doesn't matter if any of the events in the story are based on fact-- what matters is whether the story is convincing, whether the reader is able to imagine the events being true. And this convincingness doesn't necessarily even have to do with whether the story is similar to reality-- often it just has to do with whether it fits what people expect to see in a book.

For example, my mom is an extremely intellectual and scientific person. In conversation, she speaks as casually and colloquially as anyone, and when you hear her, that casual way of speaking doesn't seem out of place with her intellectual mind. This is because we know that in reality, almost everyone talks casually and colloquially in ordinary conversation, including intellectual people.

However, for part of a writing project in college, I once had her tell me a family story and I wrote it down almost word for word as she said it. I was shocked to find that, to me, my professor and all my classmates, it read as if she were a socialite yuppie soccer mom with no interest in anything scientific or intellectual at all. The same words that had seemed completely in character when she spoke them seemed completely out of character when written down.

I realized then that written "voices" are not anything like the patterns of speech in reality. For a character in a written story to seem intellectual-- especially a female character-- she must speak in a stilted sort of way that no one speaks in the real world. If she talks casually, like a real person, readers will assume she is not intellectual, except in cases where she is actively talking about something intellectual. There was no way I could have quoted my mother telling me that totally unscientific, unintellectual family story and preserved both her patterns of speech and her impression of intellect.

Furthermore, when you write fiction about a subject on which most people have misconceptions-- like autism-- it isn't enough to say something that you know is realistic, or even something that is based on a true story. You also have to try and predict what misconceptions people will have when they read it, and add enough explanation to get rid of those misconceptions.

For instance, I once wrote a story for creative writing class that was almost entirely true. It was based on a conflict I had with a special ed worker in junior high school. But instead of using my real name, I told the story in third person, calling the main character "The Autistic Child." It was a statement about how people forget our true names and personalities as soon as a label like autism becomes known to them.

I showed it to my critique group, not telling them that it was based on a true story. And they tore it apart. They said it was completely unrealistic. An autistic kid wouldn't behave like that. An autistic kid wouldn't have the intelligence and the verbal eloquence of the character in the story, and someone with that amount of intelligence would never be as socially inept as that character. Basically, they felt the story was unrealistic because it didn't fit their own completely inaccurate idea of what an autistic kid would be like.

That was when I realized that you have to try and predict your audience's misconceptions. To avoid critiques like the one I got from that group, I would have to revise the story, mentioning somewhere in it that autism is very misunderstood, and that the main character does not fit people's stereotypes of autistics. It's sad that I would have to do that... nobody ever has to explain in a story why their characters don't fit racial or gender stereotypes. But people recognize that racial and gender stereotypes are often inaccurate. They don't recognize that about stereotypes of autistics, and writers just have to keep pounding it into their heads until they do.

The reason I'm thinking about this is that several main characters in my novel are on the autism spectrum, and I hope that I've learned enough by now that I can make them realistic without making ignorant readers think that they're unrealistic.

Return of the Novelist

I posted this to LJ a while back and forgot to post it here. But it's quite relevant.

I thought I should let you guys know why I've been so silent for a while. The fact is, I'm writing a novel.

It's the strangest thing. My interest in writing fiction pretty much disappeared some time ago. I hadn't written a novel since I was fifteen. I had been writing essays for my website, lots of them, and of course a few chapters for my published book. But writing for publication had gotten very, very hard for me to do. The new publisher wants to publish a book my husband and I are going to write together, about our relationship, and I'd been trying to write for that, but it always felt like a class assignment. I'd gotten almost none of it done, because I had to force myself to do it, and even then couldn't always succeed.

Then I got caught up in a project (making a lizard costume) and my husband got worried. Not at what I was doing, but how intensely I was working on it, and how snappy I got when he offered advice or tried to talk to me about anything else. We had sort of an argument, and it ended with him suggesting that I try writing fiction again. He felt that I was desperate for a project and was trying to fill that need with things that were insufficient.

I had a science fiction idea that had been sitting around in my head. At most, I imagined a short story, because I'd been pretty much unable to write anything long since years ago. But I thought I'd run with it and see what happened. My husband said he would help me with the science and some of the plot if I needed it.

It's over sixty pages already.

I'm stunned. I had no idea that ability was still in me, and I'm spending nearly every free minute writing.

But I have realized a few strange things about my writing style.

1.

I seem unable to invent an original character who is not like me. Maybe I just don't have enough theory of mind to write from the point of view of a person who doesn't think the way I do. When I create characters, either they're based on me, or based on someone I know very closely, or else they end up completely boring and one-dimensional. In this book, I have six main characters, and three of them are based on different aspects of my own personality, one of them is based on my husband, and the other two don't have much personality at all.

2.

When creating characters of my own and making them do stuff, I am lost when it comes to characterization. See, in the real world, characterization doesn't make sense to me, because I see real humans as immensely complicated and full of contradictions. Every person I know frequently does things that seem out of character to me. I can only understand those things when I realize that humans have many, many different parts to their personalities, and that any one of a huge variety of seemingly contradictory actions will be in character with one part or another. I know I myself have moods so different from each other that they seem like different people, and something that would be completely uncharacteristic of me in Mood 1 is totally typical of Mood 2, 3 or 4.

But when people read a book, they expect the characters to be simple enough that you can tell right off the bat whether an action is in character or not. So when I make my characters do wide varieties of things, some seeming contradictory, am I being more true to life than most books, or is it bad characterization?

That's all for now. Gotta go write more. Thanks for reading.