@itsnotpatsy replied to your post “autistics are naturally better writers bc of how we see the world,...”
Heck yeah. I imagine the difference in sensory stuff must be a radical detail to be able to describe.
yeah! the sensory stuff is true,
but i was mostly talking about... hm, how to word it. it’s a combination of a autistic people having own culture of social cues and trauma that is shared among austistic people.
for example, a lot of autistic people have had to literally learn body language and how to tell sarcasm ect to try to ‘pass’ for non autistic, which means we learn to describe body language differently, we learn to describe other people’s emotions better because we constantly have to process ‘tells’.
examples: look people in the eye, don’t clap your hands softly, if someone has their arms folded it means they’re upset, if someone’s voice is all wobbly it means they’re upset, sometimes a voice going up and down means sarcasm. this makes it really easy for me to write actions into the scene, it’s more like a puzzle i guess.
oh boy that also ties into the trauma of having to pass, the teaching isn’t always nice and it’s really confusing why all these rules matter-- which makes me more intentional in how i describe body language or other details.
and there is research into mindblindness, where people with autism (im speaking generally here) have trouble like, seeing other people’s perspective? like, if something is happening and someone is upset, my first reaction is ‘i’m not upset, why is this person upset?’ (i respond ‘more appropriately’ now since forcing/faking empathy was drilled into me, which ironically makes me better at understanding a character’s emotions because i have to literally do the same thing to IRL people)
in my writing, or more my reading process (which informs my writing) i will read a book with a really specific & vivid description of a room but i still keep seeing a room i’ve seen in real life that is similar because it’s hard to imagine something wholesale sometimes? so then because i’m constantly having to tie things back into real experiences it makes my writing feel more alive, though it does limit topics i can write about sometimes. (basically Write What You Know but turned up & twisted around)
THEN there’s like, the way we organize things and sort them into categories, so when i write i sort of structure each paragraph into stages to unfold the story. like, that’s basic writing tips, to let a scene unfold in a sequence-- from the floor to the ceiling, from left to right ect, but it’s instinctual to me because of how i’ve processed the world since birth
