Pointers for English class?

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I usually do really well in school because I work well with facts. But my English class this year is based mostly around analyzing fictional characters in books from different time periods, and I’m so lost. I have to understand why an author would include certain details, understand character motive, emotions, and conversation, and to ‘read between the lines’ for details I literally can never find.

Im going to be staying after with my teacher to try to get better at this (though I doubt it will help in the way I need it to.) Does anyone have tips for how to get better at figuring out other people? Or tips for what I should say to my teacher so he’ll understand what I’m struggling with?

I sympathise with you; I had the same experience when I was at school. I was great with English Language lessons; my spelling, grammar, vocabulary etc. were always good, so it was assumed I'd be a natural at English Literature. I struggled really badly in those classes; forever reading back through the books to try to find the explanation for a character's behaviour, but never being able to find one. I think this is often why autistic people are accused of being "too literal"; we can extract facts from language, but not the subtleties of how language changes to reflect people's emotions and intent - the area known as 'pragmatics'. The problems that we might have with understanding other people's state of mind can apply every bit as much to a fictional character as to real people.

Even assuming that your teacher is aware that you have autistic traits, they may not have made the connection that reading a book raises the same issues as understanding a real social situation, and usually with less data to go on, so you need to get this across to them if you can; that it's not the reading material that's the problem, but something more fundamental about understanding how characters behave and how language is used to describe that. On the positive side, this could be a good thing if that's an aspect of real life that you struggle with. If your teacher can show you good examples of how a work can be interpreted, it might help you to learn a little bit more about how neurotypical people think socially. Although I didn't enjoy my English Lit' classes very much at the time, I'm still glad that I took them; they got me reading a lot more fiction than I ever had before, and literature contains a lot of insight into how people's minds work.