Aspie authors writing social interaction

Post Reply New Topic

That makes sense. It's good fun to try things anyway. I try writing prose 1 because that's what online forums are/what emails are/what texts are, 2 because my articles are alright and earn money sometimes and 3 because story writing is fun.
But I have a lyrical brain which can't do story telling properly. I can't think of proper middles and endings to the story ideas I have.
And I'm too much of a pedant to edit 1500 words and think them all good enough to send out once I'm done.
The flash fiction I wrote was 42 words long. Not much different to a poem really.
I was going to say not all my poems are musical but I suppose they are in that it matters how they sound, even the free verse. In fact, I spend longer on how the free verse sounds than on how the formal poems sound because there's so much freedom there, no set formula to help me out.

Just about the only style of poetry I've attempted has been free verse.

It's not the eighteenth century so the social need to write poetry isn't there. So take this advice as simply my advising someone who wants to write poetry.

If you're looking to avoid it sounding like prose and longing for musicality, forms are the place to start first. Then after a while, you can use what you learned in formal poetry and translate some of that over into free verse.

The danger of formal poetry is a lot of people who attempt poetry try to write rhyming couplets (in the 21st century, these are primarily used in jingles and comedic verse so if the attempt is to make any sort of point of substance, it doesn't work, great for comedy though) or to write as if it's still the 16th-19th century, using either sentence structures or words that nobody actually uses anymore. This comes out sounding unnatural.

When I started to write, I wrote as if it was the 19th century but I've learned over the decade or so I've been writing to do both poetic sounding free-verse and formal poetry that sounds as if it came out of the 21st century.

I think prose is something I will need to master. Not in terms of story writing or article writing but how to write online so that people understand me. Someone on here was complaining that my paragraphs are too long to be read on the screen.

Sorry to hog but I finally finished the sequence It took 3 weeks.
I think this is partly because it's sequential - technically I wrote 130 drafts in all. And partly because of the holidays.
And it's taught me I need to quit worrying so much about producing a poem every two days. As long as I'm writing every day.
And once again, a Christmas themed poem was produced by me over Christmas...

^Well done.

I write poems at a rate of about two a year with long periods in between and then one or two and then another

long gap.

Submitting for the first time since last year.

I was all smug about how being a writer I don't have to have a back to school day like mum does. (She's a teacher hence back to school but back to work in other jobs is just as bad, I've got experience of that).

This feels like it. All the admin starting up again.

It's not that I hate it like working with other people (if I did I'd never submit) but it does feel more like work than the drafting process does.

^For me the worst bit is researching literary agents.

We (poets) don't have those, just editors.

I find promotion so impossible I don't really try. I like writing, I like being published (especially if it was a while ago, the first time something's out there I get nervous for it*), I'd like readers but I don't feel comfortable with the social interaction required in getting them.

I wish there were agents who specialised in autistic/socially anxious artists and getting our work out there and dealing with the public for us as intermediaries.

My editor for my collection is a wonderfully nice woman but bad at promotion. She's aspie too. I didn't know this when getting the book published, she told me later.

Next time I'm going for an NT editor or one of those autistic types who get extroverted when they're passionate about something. Not a mirror image of me. I love when an editor from a magazine/ezine/anthology will help me with promotions.

*does anyone else find the act of seeing their work freshly published a bit akin to how a parent would feel sending their kid off to school? Like it's on show and might meet all sorts of people along the way now so just hoping it isn't too vulnerable...

^I'm not published yet but that is how I imagine it would feel.

It gets better. It really is like putting a child out there into the world. Sooner or later, you get proud of them (I mean 'it') being their (I mean 'its') own thing. Just every time, at first, I feel vulnerable for the thing. And first draft always feels so very unready. I don't know much about writing novels or stories but it takes 10 drafts til I'm ready to show someone. I love the energy of a first draft though.

Today, I finished off a poem which started autobiographically about a boy I knew as a kid on holiday who gave me a shark tooth necklace. It sort of ended up sounding like adults and the end of a relationship.

My autobiographical works end up with fiction in and my fiction ends up with autobiography in it as I work. It's why I'm glad I don't write prose, where fact versus fiction really does matter in terms of which genre it is.

I'm feeling so incredibly lazy at the moment. Hopefully in 2 weeks when my illness spell and my excited spell are over and my tiredness spell hasn't begun yet, I'll be more active with my writing.

Even when your job doesn't earn you money, it's hard not to feel a certain sort of guilt over not working.

Christmas and mum being off her job didn't help. And going online all the time doesn't help as I get tempted to just type stuff online and not do any work.

FWIW, I've read a lot of prose articles and come to the conclusion that either someone was disabled or someone was picking on me. My prose isn't all that bad. My paragraphs are average length.

This gives me hope in a world where we communicate mostly via prose and speech. It's already bad that I find talking to people hard without feeling as if I find typing to people hard, too.

I gave myself Christmas off, but after a few false starts hit the ground running again with my writing.

I didn't except the day itself but mum's a teacher and we live next door so it's sort of hard to not have a bit of a holiday. She's back at work tomorrow so hopefully that will put me into the work mindset.

I was really unwell on Saturday night. I almost fainted. I think I know what the cause was but still, I'm not sure I'm 100% feeling well or whether I should tell a doctor or whatever. But I write almost every day so I find it hard to not do just because I was unwell a few days ago. I feel weird when I don't write.

Hm this one I'm writing at the moment has left me perplexed if it's good or not (not posting on here in case it counts as 'published', increasingly that's how poems put up online are seen).

Good: it's musical, it speaks about specific concrete things in a specific place, it doesn't use archaic language, it has a semi unique voice (even if that voice is juvenile)
Bad: I'm scared people will see the juvenile voice as 'me now' which it isn't, it isn't like a contemporary poem found in the magazines and ezines I read, it's more like a song, its metre is strange so it isn't formal poetry either

I hate that way that readers always assume first person in a song or a poem is the writer. It doesn't happen in prose because prose is split into fact and fiction. Usually (as with this one) for me, it's somewhere in between fact and fiction and me and not me.

I'm finding elsewhere people discouraging me writing in a flooded market. But I can't not write and I feel the need to publish, too, and be read. In an ideal world, I'd be doing poetry readings and things but I struggle at them. Maybe what I need is a partner, someone who's good at delivery but can't write, so we can collaborate together. But performers (unlike poets) expect pay and I lack money.

My novel is in first person and the character is not me but me in a way. I agree this is easier in a novel (assumed fictional). I have heard it done well in poems though.

It amazes me the way non-writers have opinions on whether someone else should be a writer

Have you considered performing your poems via youtube? This would allow for recording in private and editing it ect.

I think if I more often wrote musical things I would do. (And if I didn't sound/look like a child and want to be published more in magazines and books than elsewhere)

I know. I wonder if saying 'only 5% of poems sent to magazines get published' is something which non writers assume only unpublished writers would say? I've known far more successful poets than me who mention it, it's simply a fact which is much lamented in the poetry world. I've been in that 5% and I'll be in that 5% again, probably.

Anyway people write to be read and because they need to write. So I'll keep writing and submitting.

There's one prose poem I have which terrifies me which I know means it will get published if I send it out because my most vulnerable stuff always does but I'm scared to send it out because it's so vulnerable. I think I'll ultimately put it in a contest or something. At least that way if it does get success, I get cash.

I was only really considering YouTube because (I assume this person was dyslexic or illiterate, if not it's just rude) they said 'lots of people write poetry but not many people read their poems to others'. My stuff's out there, if someone's dyslexic they can pick it up and have someone else read it to them, all I want/need to do is the writing, editing and imagining bit.