Helena Mary Cole

If certain careers naturally attract people with certain personality traits, like dentistry being a natural career path for sadists (see Little Shop of Horrors – great joke), then I think it follows that writing books as a profession attracts autistic people. Not all writers are autistic and not all autistic people are good writers. But writing, being a quiet, solitary activity, is going to be appealing to autistic people in a way that it might not be for your average person. I think autism lends itself well to writing anyway.

This could be one reason why so many characters from the literature I’ve read and loved in my life have turned out to be textbook autistic people, characters like Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables, Fanny Price from Mansfield Park, and the title character of Jane Eyre. In classic literature, autistic representation is high, even if it is not officially recognized as such, and even if it’s glaringly anachronistic to use the word “autistic” to describe two-hundred-year-old characters. These authors’ ability to get into the autistic mindset so well (without even being aware of that) and reproduce it in their fiction so accurately speaks to the possibility that they may have themselves been on the spectrum. There’s no way to know that for sure. It’s a theory I like because it supports by my conviction that autism lends itself well to writing books. And back when way fewer people used to attempt it, the concentration of autistic people sitting down to do it must have been higher.

I’m not sure it’s true anymore. These days, those super rare stories of authors going from rags to riches have attracted so many people to writing books, especially novels, that many who would never have thought of it a hundred years ago figure they might as well give it a shot. The lure of fame and the idea of one’s life being talked about in future centuries, long after one has died, can be hard to resist. Suddenly sitting down for hours at a go and writing has become less unattractive to people who might have shunned the very idea in a different era.

I’ve wanted to write and publish fiction since I was seven, which is when I first became aware that I loved creative writing and was discovered to have an aptitude for it by my grade two teacher. It’s been 41 years since then, and I’m just at the point where I finally have a completed manuscript to try and sell. I suspect my ADHD brain got in the way of getting here sooner; some say a little maturity and/or life experience is necessary for writing novels. For whatever reason, I’m not here till now, which is much better than never getting here at all.

Getting published is still something of an elusive sort of dream to me. I have a query letter on the point of being ready to send out to agents; I have a synopsis written; I’m mentally preparing for the coming rejections, which I have been assured will be numerous and therefore disheartening. I guess this process is designed to weed out those who really have no business writing books at all. But it can be frustrating to read a poorly executed novel and realize that it got published because the author is a marketing whiz, or else already had a famous name for some other reason. The autistic authors of the past certainly didn’t have to face the daunting world of modern-day book marketing like I do.

Well, I’m sure I’m not the first writer to go into the query phase with no marketing experience but a willingness to learn and an excitement to promote something I feel passionate about (my own work). An autistic brain can be remarkably single-minded when it comes to things like that, which I have in my favour. I imagine.

For whatever reason, I got it into my head that it might be a good marketing strategy to publish samples from my manuscript’s backstory on my blog in order to pique interest in the fate of the characters, which does not come to a head until you read the actual novel. The two samples I published before were from that manuscript; the samples I’m about to publish now come from the huge, clunky, six-figure-word-count backstory.

The purpose of writing the backstory was to give the story some depth, to get a feel for how and why the interaction between the three friends is interesting, to have something to mine for ideas when I was rewriting the manuscript for the fourth time, etc. I was feeling a little hesitant to share any of it because it doesn’t have any autistic people in it (though I sometimes wonder about Alex Hale), and I also didn’t bother to get a sensitivity read for Alex Hale (as depicted in the backstory). I don’t know who’s going to find him inaccurate – I was relying entirely on my own research. But really, the star of the show is the relationship between him and his best friends Jay and Sandy.

Keep in mind that it is backstory and I don’t think it’s publishable as a whole. But some of it is quite readable. LOL. I think so anyway. The idea is to share a few of the more interesting parts, in medias res. I think at least the next two posts will be excerpts from that. Please stand by.

P.S. I had so much fun writing these excerpts, and poured a lot of my time and energy into the entire backstory. And I loved every minute of it. I hope it will make an enjoyable read.