On Writing Neurodivergent Characters
Neurodiverse characters are everywhere in media these days. That’s fantastic! I’m all for (nuanced, multifaceted) representation. But authenticity remains elusive or incomplete. There is an inherent challenge in depicting invisible disorders in visual terms which complicates this kind of representation.
(Creating compelling neurodiverse protagonists.)
Writers will often shorthand neurodivergent characters with a mix of constantly expressed, atypical traits or behaviors to let readers or audience members know right away—This Character Is Neurodivergent. It’s good to remember that an autistic person may have the characteristics and traits of autism, but they are not their autism.
When creating a character who is, say, autistic (as I am), you must find ways to demonstrate to your reader that your character is neurodivergent. Without properly understanding these characteristics, however, neurodivergent characters can come across as one-note or perpetuate damaging tropes and stereotypes. So, let’s talk about the expression of some of those traits and what can trigger them.
Stimming
Chances are, you’ve seen someone stim or even stimmed yourself. Think of a little kid flapping their hands when they get over-excited. It’s a triggered, repetitious motion that serves as a physical release after being over-stimulated. The difference for autistic folks can be how it intrudes on their daily lives, lasting longer or occurring with greater frequency.
I stim all the time, triggered by everything from forgetting to close the refrigerator or anxiety over an upcoming meeting. I flap my hands or drum on my forehead. I may sniff loudly to release all the energy at once if I’m having a larger reaction. In my youth, this, sadly, even involved compulsive, self-injurious behavior.
But you’ll never see me do it because, like many neurodiverse people, I’ve been conditioned to mask it by turning away or leaving a room to avoid being seen by neurotypical people. Does that mean it can be controlled? Yes and no. I can’t control when it happens, but sometimes I can control whether I hand-flap or, say, snap my fingers in response.
When writing a character who stims, understand not only their triggers but also the different levels. Similarly, if it’s a character who has been doing this a long time, masking or a series of feints to hide the trait will likely be a part of their conditioning.
Routines
In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, the narrator explains that “well-meaning people” come to zoos and bemoan the fact that the animals are in enclosures when they should be in the wild living. He counters this by explaining that once an animal, like a lion, takes possession of its space in a zoo, it will “behave in the same way within its enclosure as it would in its territory in the wild.” Its needs are met. It will defend its territory. It is satisfied by its understanding
That’s how I think about my daily routines. I don’t have to do the same thing every day, but it helps me mentally prepare if I understand what any given day will look like. A neurodivergent comedian, Patrick Loller, said similar things on TikTok about his time in the military. When a follower expressed surprise that someone with autism would do well in the army due to the rigid rules and expectations, he explained that he succeeded because the routines and guidelines served him. It’s why I’ve always found myself in the pages of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. The exacting and precise butler, Stevens, thrives within a system in which he always understands what’s expected of him.
Neurodivergent characters in media who crave these kinds of routines can be painted as needlessly inflexible or pitiable. If you understand these needs as a way someone centers and supports themselves, your character will be more empowered.
Check out Mark Wheaton’s Who Haunts You here:
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Eye Contact
The inability to make eye contact, particularly with strangers, is one of Christopher’s most pronounced characteristics in Mark Haddon’s bestselling and influential*, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. It makes the main character’s investigations into the death of a neighbor’s dog, and the earlier disappearance of his mother, difficult as he and his motives are often misunderstood or mistrusted.
Why no eye contact? Well, it can be tied to trouble with social interactions in general. There can be judgment or perceived judgment in the eyes of strangers. Part of being neurodivergent can mean having a hard time picking up on social cues. A fix for Christopher in the novel is that he often closes his eyes. One for me when doing author panels over the years has been to take off my glasses so I couldn’t make eye contact if I wanted to. Of course, this can become confusing for others when they later see me making eye contact with people I’m familiar with.
If using this trait to identify a character, it’s potentially important to differentiate between their abilities with eye contact when it comes to strangers or acquaintances versus family and friends.
Social Interaction
Having a character uncomfortable with social situations is one of the most common pieces of autism-coding in media. Lou, in Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark, when asked by his psychiatrist about socializing mentions that he plays games on the internet with a friend in Germany and another in Indonesia. She meant “in real life.” In Richard Powers’ Bewilderment, Theo repeatedly takes his neurodivergent son into the woods for such long periods of time that when the book begins, it almost feels like they’re the last two people on Earth.
(Dyslexia is a writer’s super power—with help.)
For several different reasons, social interaction can be hard for neurodivergent people. It’s outside the routine. There’s the potential for sensory overload as autistic people can have heightened reactions to external stimuli—bright lights, smells, textures, sound, conversations with multiple people—that overwhelm our senses. This can lead to mental fatigue which require sensation-free downtime afterwards. Simply joining a conversation can be awkward if you’re not great at reading body language or experience delayed speech. I once thought I was hard of hearing as overlapping conversations can overwhelm my senses to the point that I can’t differentiate speakers.
Neurodivergent folks can long for connection, particularly given their propensity toward empathy (though this can also be tricky as someone who is highly empathetic can also get bogged down in or fatigued by the traumas of others), it just might not look the same as for neurotypical people. Finding creative ways for your characters to engage in social situations on their own terms will add to their dimensionality.
Hyperfixation
Hyperfixations are hardly specific to autism but shared across a number of disorders. It’s an intense, all-consuming focus on a single topic at the expense of others (not to be confused with savant syndrome, in which a person may express significant mental acuity in a single field—a condition that remains catnip for writers despite being extremely rare). Hyperfixations are often used in detective novels to show how someone, such as Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, can digest and make connections through vast amounts of information in a short amount of time.
In the past year or so, my daughter’s hyperfixations have included: teaching herself French, 3-D printing, Dungeons & Dragons, bearded dragons, Dune, the Preacher comic, teaching herself Mandarin, coding, Tang Soo Do, etc. Some hyperfixations stick around, like fencing. Others, like learning pan flute, faded.
Hyperfixations, in real life and in literature, can come across like hyper-intelligence when really it might indicate a good memory or that your character recently spent 100+ hours devouring every fact they could find about the subject. When creating a hyperfixated character, it’s also important to remember that these can dwindle, leaving someone’s home filled with the detritus of prior hyperfixations.
All that said, at the end of the day, what really adds authenticity to your neurodiverse characters is everything else in an autistic person’s life that have nothing to do with their traits. Countless people I encounter in my day-to-day life have no idea I’m autistic. So, by all means, bring neurodivergent characters into your thrillers, romance novels, YA mysteries, and verse epics. But by doing a little homework and giving them a full life outside of their neurodivergent behaviors, you can create more authentic, lived-in personalities.
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*Bestselling and influential yet controversial in the neurodivergent community for perpetuating stereotypes of autistic children being a burden and sympathizing with the main character’s abusive father.