Abstract:

Research with autistic participants taking part in creative writing groups suggests that such writing may have the potential to increase social skills development, enhance a sense of belonging, build self-confidence and improve the abilities of writers within this cohort to cope with distress and overwhelm.

This study works with published autistic writers to explore this further, asking why these authors write, how they believe their autism interacts with their writing, and what they perceive as the potential positive impact of creative writing for autistic individuals.

Nine writers were recruited from the UK-wide Beyond the Spectrum writing initiative to take part in the study. This initiative engages published autistic authors to facilitate creative writing workshops with autistic people. Initial data gathered from the writers involved the creation of a 100-word extended metaphors for the creative writing process. Reflections on these metaphors were gathered from across the cohort, and participants were further invited to create a piece of ‘free writing’ (i.e. not edited or crafted) to explore how their autism impacted their writing experience.

Original metaphors, reflections and free writing were then subjected to ‘poetic transcription’ by the researcher, herself an autistic senior academic. Poetic transcription (or ‘found poetry’) is a research approach that reconstructs participants’ words and phrases into a form which aims to be compact and evocative. This enables the sharing of the participants’ ideas in their own words in a concentrated form, enabling a greater element of ‘voice’ to survive into research findings. These poetic summaries of the main ideas were returned to the writers for comment and further reflection.

Findings from the study include that these autistic writers value the intensity of their autistic interests as a source of both material and of their intense focus within their writing. Participants share how autism impacts their creation of character, how working creatively facilitates navigation of emotions and enables communication, how working within fictional contexts can support processing of memories, anxiety and sensory stimuli and – importantly – how writing can be a source of satisfaction, empowerment and joy. They articulate various ways that their autism supports their writing, and that their autistic selves are supported through the process of writing. The participants further share their reflections on the potential for this research approach to be used more widely with autistic individuals. Ways that writing – including the use of poetic transcription – may be a valuable source of communication and expression for some autistic people are considered, and specific implications for the classroom and lecture hall discussed.

Keywords:

Autism, creative writing, poetic transcription.