What Accurate Actually Means When You're Not the One Diagnosed
Representation
I write a lot of characters I am not. Jake isn't me. Gabe, the woodworker in Under the Willows isn't me. And yet people sometimes assume that because I write neurodivergent characters accurately, I must always be writing from inside their exact experience. I'm not. I mean, I do. I draw upon my own experience to help me explore theirs. But also, I write from just outside their experience as observer - a sibling's view, a parent's, a partner's - and I think that's a different, equally legitimate kind of accuracy, if it’s done carefully.
The crescent moon taken on my local walk.
There's a version of "accurate representation" that only means getting the diagnostic detail right. Careful analysis of the sensory specifics, the language a character would or wouldn't use about themselves, the shape and sensation of a meltdown or a shutdown. That matters, and I take it seriously. But it's not the whole of it. The deeper accuracy, I think, is in how the people around a neurodivergent character are written. I like to explore whether they're allowed to misunderstand without that misunderstanding being played as villainy, whether their love is allowed to coexist with their confusion, whether the narrative punishes them for not having all the answers.
Because let’s be honest: being the parent or partner of a neurodivergent person is complex. We can’t see their inner world. And while we may try very hard not to misunderstand, sometimes we do. And that is painful for both the observer and the neurodivergent person themselves. But it is real.
A lot of fiction gets this half right and half wrong. It'll nail the character's internal experience and then flatten everyone around them into either saints or obstacles. I try to write the outside view with the same care as the inside one, because most of us, most of the time, are the person on the outside of somebody else's difference. And we’re all doing the imperfect, ongoing work of trying to understand someone we love without knowing their interior experience.
This is where the therapy room and the page genuinely meet. So much of what I sit with, session after session, isn't the neurodivergent person's confusion about themselves; by the time they're in front of me, they usually have more self-knowledge than anyone gives them credit for. It's the confusion of everyone around them: partners who don't know if they're allowed to feel exhausted, parents who don't know if naming a difficulty is compassion or betrayal, siblings who were never given language for what they are living through.
Writing that accurately doesn't require me to have lived every version of neurodivergence I put on the page. It requires me to have sat, closely and often, with what not-understanding actually looks and feels like from every seat in the room - and to trust that a reader who's lived either side of that will recognise it, without me needing to explain it to them first.
Under The Willows comes out in October. You can pre-order your copy below.
