Thursday, June 3, 2010

Writing Update

I got started on my Autism story that I mentioned earlier. I wrote l,lll words. Not kidding, all ones. I hope that the story will be somewhere around 3,000 words. So my progress stands at:

Here's a question for those of you who saw my description of my story idea. Do you think many people would be offended by my suggestion that the world would be unable to function if 9/10 of people were autistic? Is that unfair of me to say? Am I misinformed about autism? Should I come up with a different disorder to use in the story? I'm curious.

3 comments:

Bosley Gravel said...

Didn't see the previous post, but, as I understand it (and I'm admittedly at least somewhat ignorant) is that autism symptoms run a spectrum, so seems unlikely that severity would all be the same in 9/10s of a population, so unless that was accounted for it would seem a little hard to digest. But, I'm missing your original story pitch, so maybe I'm just jabbering my jaw uninvited. :P

Lizanne Herd said...

Just realize... Autism is part of a spectrum. When you use the word, you're using a blanket term. Some kids, with Asberger's at one end of the Spectrum are very high functioning and can do very well, even in social settings. Then there are the hard-core true autistics, who have almost no concept of "not-me." They can hardly function at all without assistance. The vast majority fall somewhere along the continuum, with certain functional abilities, mentally and socially, but are still challenging as individuals.

I would say, the closer they fall toward that end of the spectrum the more likely society would collapse. Even if they are not hard-core, it would. Most are not savants, regardless of what Hollywood likes to show us. Many have other disabilities along with autism just to add to the difficulties.

Some common challenges:
-Argue with any discrepancy of fact, no matter how small
-Must have their own way
-No sense of boundary or personal space
-Auto-stimulation in public
-Panic attacks
-Heightened frustration levels resulting in fits of anger or temper tantrums or crying or balling up
-Fixation
-Expectation that everyone should think like them and frustration when they don't
-Lots of physical tics like finger twiddling, head bobbing
-strange attempts at class humor

Jason said...

I don't really know enough about autism to judge if your hypothesis is correct, but you might do better--and not piss as many people off--if you came up with your own disease. Or condition, which ever. You can base it off of autism, or maybe come up with a new off shoot of that disease? One that is more severe and you won't have to worry about the range the other comments mention. Give it your own spin?