Why Neurodivergent Characters Keep Getting Written Wrong
It can sometimes feel like there are only two types of neurodivergent (ND) characters in fiction, film and TV. There's the savant – the dazzling, slightly inhuman one, useful to the plot in proportion to how unusual they are. And there's the burden – a source of grief for the people around them, understood only through the exhaustion of loving them. Both are written from the outside. Neither is written from inside the experience of being that person, waking up in that body and mind, doing the normal things ND people do to get through each day.
I hear the real version of this every week, in a converted garden office in Cambridgeshire, from women of all ages who have spent years being the wrong kind of character in their own lives. Too much. Too sensitive. Too literal, or not literal enough. Frequently misread as cold when they are actually overwhelmed, or as scattered when they are actually holding four systems in their head at once just to get through a school run.
None of them are dazzling.
None of them are burdens.
They are just people whose operating system doesn’t fit with the standard one everyone else was given. But nobody cares to find out why its overheating all the time.
Popular culture often (not always! There are fabulous writers out there who truly get it because they’re writing from their own lived experience) keeps missing this because it asks the wrong question. It asks what does this character's neurodivergence do to the story? And the answer is usually that they create conflict, explain a quirk, generate sympathy. But what I really want fiction to ask instead, (and what my books do), is what does it feel like to be a mind like this, moving through a world built for a different one.
The first question produces a device. The second produces a person.
I don't think this is malicious. I think it's mostly about proximity. Many people writing neurodivergent characters have observed neurodivergence rather than lived it. They’ve watched it from the outside, the way you'd watch weather from a window. Weather from a window looks dramatic. It doesn't look like what it actually feels like to stand in it. When you try and try to translate your own perfectly coherent internal logic into a language other people will accept.
When I write, I try to stay inside the window rather than outside it. Not to explain neurodivergence to a reader who doesn't have it (although that is part of why I write, because education is crucial to more compassion), but to let a reader who is ND feel, for a few pages, unexplained. Recognised rather than diagnosed. Seen just for being them.
I’m sure I don’t always get it right. Being inside my ND brain is just being inside my ND brain, not someone else’s. And who am I to try to express the themes that come up in my therapy room as fiction? But I do know what I'm trying to avoid, which is character-as-symptom-list, character-as-lesson, character-as-window-dressing for someone else's arc.
I'm trying to write the version of NDness I've spent my own life being, without asking her to perform either brilliance or brokenness to earn her place on the page.
If you are intrigued by my books, you can find out more about Little Bird (out now) and Under The Willows (available for preorder).
