Writing Adjacent - Tumblr Posts

Remember: I don't know your world. I barely know your characters. If this advice doesn't apply, think on it but don't force it.

There is a LOT to cover in this small post so i'm going to skip over the big fucking autistic elephant for just this moment!

From most problematic to least :D

A) Villainizing DID

You are definitely villainizing DID. Certainly. Like this is one of the most clear-cut examples of villainzing DID that I have ever heard.

Seriously:

A "secret" criminal alter

DID meant to not demonstrate people with DID but to scare non-plurals

Murder Mystery Genre

DID as a shocking plot twist

Please, for the love that is holy, don't write THAT aspect of his character. The majority of the DID community doesn't have criminal alters and by writing that specific part of your character you're introducing ableistic bullshit into you writing where mental illness is not meant to be sympathized with but to horrified off.

This is especially bad-looking when you understand that DID (aka dissociative identity disorder) is caused by extensive trauma in their early childhood. I'm talking about the worst kinds of things one can suffer. Not just name-calling. Not just something you can pull out of the Murder Mystery HAT! F#CK!!

B) Delusions

This can work.

It can.

But should it?

From a purely writer perspective, if you already have a character who doesn't see the murder in "murder mystery" as wrong then why do you need DID to throw into the mix for a half-handed messy plot twist that doesn't need to be there?

If you wanted to make Liam Clark a villain while still being an unreliable narrator, just have them be murdering people and then cut those parts out.

HECK! Why do you need delusion in the first place?! Just have Liam Clark be a normal autistic guy who sometimes murders people! Then the theme can be "murderers are humans, not monsters"!

It just screams "demonizing mental illness" and that is not good at all.

C) Autism

At this point, the focus should be on the fact that these autistic traits are going to be seen as evidence that "displays how this guy was always mentally screwed up".

When your audience sympathetizes for the loner bullied guy who gets called weird by his classmates, they are going to feel like they should have been calling this guy weird the whole time!

They are going to re-read the book and see all of these autistic traits and say to themselves "oh how didn't I see this murderer sooner?"

So many times movies and shows use autistic traits to communicate to the audience that something spiritually or morally wrong with that individual.

I'm not saying that autistic characters can't be villains. I'm just saying that it's a delicate topic.

Here are some tips:

The only way this is going to work out for you is if you add a sympathetic good person autistic person. You need to convince your audience that autistic people are not the villain. Only Liam Clark is.

Try to add sympathetic reasoning behind why Liam Clark acts like this. Use diction to properly show why he would find this texture disgusting

Honesty: Yes, autistic people can sound rude when they are trying to be candidly helpful. If Liam Clark is trying to be helpful to these people and he comes of as rude, that is not an issue. If Liam Clark is just saying hurtful shit because he wants to then that's not autism, that's being an asshole.

Really? Your villain is a guy obsessed with horror movies? And is autistic? how groundbreaking...

WAKE UP!!! Scream did it first! And every single f*cking Scream copy-cat did it after you!

This is just pure cliche and is definitely going to be seen as you villainizing autistic traits like hyperfixation.

CONCLUSION:

Is Liam Clark a poor example of autism representation? Kinda. It could swing to good and bad depending on how you play with his traits.

Is Liam Clark a poor example of DID representation? Yes. Definitely.

Is Liam Clark a poor example of delusion representation? Almost certainly.

Liam Clark is a fucking ableist character who feels wholly unsympathetic, kinda disgusting, and pretty ableist all things considered.

Is Liam Clark un-fixable? Obviously not.

You could have Liam Clark as the autistic DID guy who isn't the villain. That's an actual twist.

You could have Liam Clark be the autistic villain who battles against actual hero, autistic somebody!

But never put people with delusions and/or DID in the fucking villain role

I Need help creating a new Character

HI, so I have a new character, but I am worried I would write him wrongly.

My new character is called Liam Clark. But the thing is, he is the villain in his own story.

Sort of like Norman Bates but the thing is,he is austistic.

Yeah, I am so worried. I have opened like ten tabs on Autism in teens and kids and boys. I read a book Lady Midnight by Cassandra Clare. Great book by the way. Where Ty , has autism or has the traits ,show don't tell but done amazedly well.I think.

My other worry is that he is a villain, anti-hero. Who commits crimes without his knowledge.

I even wrote a draft, if anyone who is Autistic, please tell me if I am writing wrongly. So I can improve it.

I even want to consult one of my friends, but I feel like I am overstepping a boundary by asking him to help me.

I would ask him tho.

So, I have created his well personality, kind off. I want to make him a guy who happens to be autistic not an autistic guy and that's it.I am somewhere, not quite.

So, Liam Clark, is a seventeen-year high School student from southern California.

Liam is a smart dude, gets all A and Bs and stuff. At his High School, people bully him for being "werid" because he likes staring at stuff that are posters. Liam is obsessed with posters and Horror films. The book takes place in 2019 so is very progressive. He HATES loud music and HATES being stared at and it pisses him off.He hates the texture of yogurt because it reminds him of something NSFW, but he is into it.He still eats it because he can and taste like wet cement. He is very picky with his food and stuff and avoids the texture. He is very honest, very rude if you don't know him and points out the obvious to people which pisses them off. He doesn't like socializing much Tho, His classmates are little shits and call him Aussie just to piss him off. And in the first chapter, he calls them out. He really wants to punch those kids but he is worried that he would get in trouble for it, so he insults them in his mind. He divides his lunch and certain foods that look like plastic.

Plus, he is bisexual. Attracted to men most but attracted to women. Since he doesn't get social cues, he would tell the guy to his face about his assets and even girls to which makes them shocked.

Not the best guy right.

I am scared to write him because I feel like I am villainizing Autistic people and making him a villain.

Please I need help.

Worst of all is that he suffers from a big delusional disorder so he doesn't really see what he did was wrong even if it stared at him in the face. And DID, which he isn't aware of his criminal version of himself which does crime from petty to straight up evil. He doesn't get it, he becomes ignorant. He is unreliable narrator.

The story is indded a Murder Mystery which is told in first person and not chronologically.

He is a white guy who is lanky and skinny and stuff.

So yeah.

I need criticism need to improve him, or I would lock him away. And never write him.

I am stretching my hands towards the Autistic community asking for help and advice. Thank you.

Heres a link to the draft. Thanks if anyone reads it and gives their viewpoint.It is also kind of Satire.

I Am Not A Murderer I Swear ( Book 1 #I Am Not Series ) - Google Docs

Thank you so much for the positive response! As someone who has a intense interest in mental illness and media, I can get exceedingly annoyed when I see the same reductive portrayal of these conditions, I can often forget the well-meaning person behind the creation.

For that, I apologize.

If you still want to write a story where Liam Clark is unaware of the murdering, you could use the supression or repression of memories.

It would be an interesting way to still keep Liam Clark in the dark about the murders while not outright villainizing any specific disorder.

Although, if you are going this route, I recommend that some traces of the memories "bubble" up from time to time. It can be a misplaced phobia that doesn't really make sense, an avoidance of certain actions that his brain may associate with the murders, and other stuff like that.

If you want to send in a more "formal" writing advice request, my inbox is always open :)

I Need help creating a new Character

HI, so I have a new character, but I am worried I would write him wrongly.

My new character is called Liam Clark. But the thing is, he is the villain in his own story.

Sort of like Norman Bates but the thing is,he is austistic.

Yeah, I am so worried. I have opened like ten tabs on Autism in teens and kids and boys. I read a book Lady Midnight by Cassandra Clare. Great book by the way. Where Ty , has autism or has the traits ,show don't tell but done amazedly well.I think.

My other worry is that he is a villain, anti-hero. Who commits crimes without his knowledge.

I even wrote a draft, if anyone who is Autistic, please tell me if I am writing wrongly. So I can improve it.

I even want to consult one of my friends, but I feel like I am overstepping a boundary by asking him to help me.

I would ask him tho.

So, I have created his well personality, kind off. I want to make him a guy who happens to be autistic not an autistic guy and that's it.I am somewhere, not quite.

So, Liam Clark, is a seventeen-year high School student from southern California.

Liam is a smart dude, gets all A and Bs and stuff. At his High School, people bully him for being "werid" because he likes staring at stuff that are posters. Liam is obsessed with posters and Horror films. The book takes place in 2019 so is very progressive. He HATES loud music and HATES being stared at and it pisses him off.He hates the texture of yogurt because it reminds him of something NSFW, but he is into it.He still eats it because he can and taste like wet cement. He is very picky with his food and stuff and avoids the texture. He is very honest, very rude if you don't know him and points out the obvious to people which pisses them off. He doesn't like socializing much Tho, His classmates are little shits and call him Aussie just to piss him off. And in the first chapter, he calls them out. He really wants to punch those kids but he is worried that he would get in trouble for it, so he insults them in his mind. He divides his lunch and certain foods that look like plastic.

Plus, he is bisexual. Attracted to men most but attracted to women. Since he doesn't get social cues, he would tell the guy to his face about his assets and even girls to which makes them shocked.

Not the best guy right.

I am scared to write him because I feel like I am villainizing Autistic people and making him a villain.

Please I need help.

Worst of all is that he suffers from a big delusional disorder so he doesn't really see what he did was wrong even if it stared at him in the face. And DID, which he isn't aware of his criminal version of himself which does crime from petty to straight up evil. He doesn't get it, he becomes ignorant. He is unreliable narrator.

The story is indded a Murder Mystery which is told in first person and not chronologically.

He is a white guy who is lanky and skinny and stuff.

So yeah.

I need criticism need to improve him, or I would lock him away. And never write him.

I am stretching my hands towards the Autistic community asking for help and advice. Thank you.

Heres a link to the draft. Thanks if anyone reads it and gives their viewpoint.It is also kind of Satire.

I Am Not A Murderer I Swear ( Book 1 #I Am Not Series ) - Google Docs

I was about to say, that sounds like Rusty-rambling. :D

So one of the other Tapas writers rambled about armor in the medieval world in the Tapas discord server, and I figured I should share it with you all because it's some really good stuff!

So depending on the type of armor, how you'd process it for reuse varies pretty heavily. Mail, for instance, is fairly easy to resize for someone else because you can add or remove links fairly easily. Same goes for repairs. A good thrust can bust through even riveted mail, but the damaged links can be replaced easily enough. Well, I say fairly easily. It's a pain in the ass to work with. But it's still cheaper on the whole than plate armor, and it's far more likely that someone who isn't a member of the nobility can get their hands on it. Plate armor can range from a simple cuirass to a full set. A full set is usually bespoke to the person, so you probably wouldn't try to steal the whole thing. It would take ages to remove it from a corpse, and if they ended up dead whilst wearing it, the stuff probably isn't worth the effort to begin with. A chestplate or helmet that's been stoved in by a warhammer isn't exactly a candidate for the "it'll buff out" treatment. Then there's the fact that the previous owner's family might reasonably expect this expensive and time consuming investment of theirs to be returned with the freshly minted corpse. So, take the good bits that you can get off in a hurry, but stripping the whole set is ill advised. You expect a helmet to go missing, but if someone's taking the time to remove, say, the codpiece, there will be questions. Recycling any sort of armor into weapons is probably not the best of ideas. The steel you'd want to use for armor is different than the steel you'd want to use for swords. Swords, especially around Europe, North Africa, etc, were typically through hardened and made to be flexible. Armor needs to be more rigid, so it would go through a different heat treat process and would need different carbon content. Not that medieval smiths knew what carbon was, exactly, but they had their own ways of grading steel. It can be done, but there are a lot of things that can be done that you wouldn't necessarily want to. I can, if I was so inclined, go to the shooting range in a tactical maid outfit. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. Full plate would be the equivalent to rocking up to battle in an M1 Abrams. Cool as hell, but waaaay to expensive for the average man at arms. Just about everyone would have a helmet of some kind, and there were all kinds of variations on armor that were more affordable to peasants pressed into military service. Gambesons, as you mentioned, were surprisingly effective. They could be augmented in a lot of useful ways, too. If you want a really good reference for historical arms and armor, there's an anime called Maria the Virgin Witch that gets a lot of stuff right. Not only in terms of styles and types, but how it was used and how one might reasonably expect to fight against it.

This all was written by Rusty! He's a great writer and has a whole bunch of novels out if any of you guys want to check it out!

(You guys should totally reblog this to help those who could use this information to see this <3)