I was diagnosed with autism in 2022 and started Writing On The Spectrum in August of 2023 to write about my diagnosis—and set the blog to private. I wrote a single introductory post on autism, then spent the next few months sharing poetry and odd bits of prose.
I found it surprisingly hard to write about autism, even though I knew no one would read my posts. But sharing snippets of my creative writing was easy. I liked my short pieces. It was the longer stuff that was a problem.
I had been writing for most of my life, but none of my novels ever came out "right." I had dozens of unfinished manuscripts and those I had finished failed to meet genre expectations over and over again.
Fast forward to April 2024. I had just finished my first full-length vampire story with the help of an online critique group. When that story failed, I realized that I'd hit a wall with my writing.
In an attempt to understand why structuring long-form fiction was so hard for me, I began to learn about autism and how it was affecting my ability to construct a narrative. An, as I did, I began to realize how autism and decades of pretending to be someone I wasn't had impacted me over the course of my life.
I decided it was time to own my authentic self and started to write about autism, creativity and related topics on the blog . For me, this meant no more pretending across the board. And so, in April of 2024, I set Writing On The Spectrum to public.
So far posts are a mix of my original paranormal fiction, poetry and thoughts on autism and the writing process but I'm really just getting started. Moving forward I'm going to be sharing more about my own personal experience with autism and writing.
Whether I'll ever express any of this in a nonfiction book or memoir is debatable.
I have always thought that the best way to communicate is via story or through blog posts and I still think that. I want to keep on doing what I'm doing but a nonfiction book isn't necessarily off the table.
I hope that if you're an autistic writer or creator, you'll find something of interest here. Please feel free to reach out to me via email at contact@barbaragraver.com or in the comments.
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