For years, I could arrange the events of a story without understanding the lives of the people inside it. Learning to give those people their own limitations and choices changed both my writing and my experience of being human.
I wrote many stories during my school days. One won third prize in primary school. Thinking back, perhaps I did not deserve the prize, because I had not understood something fundamental about a story. Story writing was an analytical and technical problem to me then: “How do I construct a series of events to fit the teacher’s criteria for a story?” I approached it as if I were constructing a building from a pile of random Lego bricks. Each brick represented an event I knew from the news, a storybook or my personal experiences.
I understood causality and what constituted an individual scene. Excellent stories from other authors supplied templates for organising events and moving from scene to scene. However, I could not create characters with a self or individuality. They did not make meaningful decisions, experience pain or make sacrifices. Far from being pivotal forces in the story, they were annoying props I had to add for my work to qualify as a story. The resulting stories were a mash of events, mostly “copied and pasted” from stories I had read.
Advice about interesting characters, an interesting plot and an interesting presentation did not reach the problem. I needed to understand how to create characters who behaved like human beings, how their actions could produce a coherent plot, and how to present events through a recognisable human consciousness.
In 2005, while writing a story, my characters came to life and wrote it themselves. I was relegated to the role of an omniscient reporter, recording their experiences as they happened. That was how the change felt. Their individuality began determining their choices instead of my need to assemble a plot. I could no longer move them around arbitrarily without violating who they had become. I awakened to the meaning of “being human”. Writing was no longer merely a hobby or a possible way to make my living. It was a way to bring my Humanity out of myself.
I began with an outline of a character’s personality, characteristics and beliefs, not a complete picture. More became clear as the story unfolded, without their traits becoming disconnected from one another. In that writing mode, I was not predicting the next action and then being surprised by it. I was like an unthinking journalist recording an event as it happened.
In the stories I write, characters develop through making choices, reacting and living with the consequences. It is rather like a comic character drawing itself: more of the person takes shape through what happens. Someone so passive that they contribute nothing to the story would not appear, or would remain a generic background character.
Learning to create a story was different from learning how to understand one. What I Learnt from Fiction – and What I Misunderstood describes the stories I watched and read, and why their intended lesson was not always the one I received.
A yellow taxi in the story of Life
One night during that period of writing in 2005, I stopped to rest and looked outside. As a yellow taxi passed, a realisation struck me. I saw myself, then everyone else, within the vast story of Life and the great weaving each of us was doing.
I experienced the Eternal Observer and the Eternal Creator at once. Human selfhood and individuality became more understandable: the characters in my writing had their own lives, and so did the people around me. I was also a person living within the story, not only someone watching it.
I rested in my chair, taking in that wordless understanding of human experience. This followed the earlier body-and-space breakthrough. The 2005 insight concerned the self as an individual; the wider opening into Relational Meaning in June 2018 concerned that self as part of the whole. Understanding individuality and experiencing relational participation were different developments.
For me, individuality was a prerequisite for understanding relationships, and for learning from my past so that I would not repeat the same mistake. It let me critically agree or disagree with what I read, rather than simply accept it as true.
By 2018, I was no longer writing fiction, so I have no later fiction to compare with the earlier work. Returning to fiction will have to wait until I retire from paid work.
Human existence as a set of limitations
With my insight, I realised I need seven restrictions to guide my work and thinking. A realistic story must take account of the limitations under which its characters live:
- The human body: We have limited strength, reach, speed and sensory range. Temperature affects us. We can be injured, become tired and need rest. A character cannot act as though the body has disappeared whenever it becomes inconvenient.
- The human mind: Attention, memory and processing capacity are limited. Perception can mislead us. Habits, instincts, expectations and social norms influence what we notice and how we respond.
- Time: A solution that takes fifty years to mature may arrive too late. Some events unfold faster than we can respond, and attending to one thing means that something else must wait.
- The physical environment: Space, resources and surroundings constrain what can be done. A deep discount is not useful if we have nowhere to store the goods.
- The social environment: Authority, cooperation, norms and other people’s fears or desires affect what we can implement. Technical possibility does not automatically create permission or support.
- History: Present possibilities arise from what has already happened. We can change our next action, but cannot rewrite an earlier promise, injury or decision to obtain a more convenient starting point.
- The laws of physics: Heat, gravity and material strength do not disappear because a solution would be convenient. Fiction can establish different rules, but those rules still need coherent consequences.
These restrictions are not merely obstacles to creativity. They supply its problem. A character with unlimited time, knowledge, resources and power has little reason to struggle, compromise or depend on anyone else.
They also prevent us from confusing what the author knows with what the character knows. I may see the entire plot. A person living inside it has to choose without knowing how the story ends.
The purpose of human existence
My answer to this question is spiritual. I see growth, limitations and choices as closely related parts of our human existence:
Growth: We enter the world of existence to follow the Path we have chosen to walk. As we live, we change from one state of being to another through experience. Our time in the physical World is temporary; it gives us an opportunity to participate rather than merely observe.
Experiencing limitations: To grow, we encounter limitations. They force us to choose something over something else. If we could obtain every possibility without effort, loss or consequence, choices would lose much of their meaning.
Making choices: Each choice is an act of self-definition. Our choices give substance to our character. Believing that I am courageous, generous or loyal expresses potential character; what I do when those qualities cost me something gives the belief substance. Those choices must be understood within the person’s actual abilities and opportunities.
This is my understanding of Life, not a demand that readers share my spiritual beliefs. Accepting that limitations exist does not require preserving avoidable suffering. Improving the conditions in which people live is itself a meaningful choice. A story becomes more than a sequence of incidents when it shows what someone chooses and becomes through living.
Let the character make the next move
Instead of asking only, “What event should I insert next?”, ask, “Given what this person knows, wants and fears, what might they do? What will that action make possible or impossible?”
Pain, sacrifice and decisions are not decorative ingredients to add for emotional effect. They arise because something matters to someone who cannot have everything. A sacrifice is not meaningful merely because the author labels it one; the reader needs to understand what is being given up and why.
Other characters have their own positions. They can misunderstand an action, resist a plan, offer help or make a choice the first character did not anticipate. I call the interaction in which people anticipate and respond to one another Reactive Predictive Communications. In a story, it helps one person’s choice generate another person’s response. This does not require the ending to remain open.
For practice, write a short scene involving two people who want different things. Give each some information the other lacks, and a limitation neither can simply wish away. Write the scene from each perspective. Then change one belief or constraint and consider whether their next choices should change too.
A character can be mistaken, inconsistent or self-deceiving. Being human does not mean always making the logically best choice. In my writing, a character could want to avoid the ending I had set, but could not escape it. Their attempts to avoid it, together with the circumstances they encountered, became part of what brought that ending about.
Fiction also has a limitation: its people can only challenge us within what we have imagined. A convincing story does not prove that we understand a real person. Their words, behaviour and feedback may overturn the entire explanation.
A symbolic world can give experience a form
Rachel Tan describes using The Sims to represent different parts of herself. Characters, rooms and interactions gave her a familiar medium for exploring her inner world. Her account interests me because the representation was something she created and could encounter, not merely a description somebody else supplied.
A story, drawing, game or imagined place can let us give form to something we cannot yet explain directly. The form may begin as deliberate construction and then reveal a possibility we had not planned.
My characters becoming more fully individual was one such experience for me. Later, I came to understand creative participation as soul play: a way to explore with the soul, rather than only produce an object or display an existing skill.
For a small exercise, create a character facing two incompatible wishes. Give the character a setting, a limitation and something they cannot obtain merely by insisting. Let them act, then consider what their action changes. The scene does not have to be autobiographical, and nobody else needs to see it.
The creator should have room to choose what the representation means. A robot might express distance, precision, protection, curiosity or something else entirely. It is not an answer key through which an observer can diagnose the person who drew it.
An imagined event can change how I approach a real experience without changing what historically happened. Likewise, discovering a convincing motive for a character does not establish the motive of a real person. Imagination can open an experience or a question; contact with the world tells us what holds beyond it.
The preparation before the writing
Before working on one of my book manuscripts, I went through a period of reading, reflecting and relaxing. I had stepped away from almost all the activities in which I had previously been involved. For many weeks, I neither wrote a word nor planned what to write.
I read a large stack of books and reflected on whatever came to mind. From outside, it could look as though I was merely lazing around or staring at the scenery. People urged me to find a job. With no pages to show, I found it difficult to explain what I was doing.
Eventually, I felt an intense urge to write. Looking back, I regard the quieter period as part of the preparation, even though I could not have presented it as a writing plan while it was happening.
That does not make waiting a substitute for writing. It reminds me to distinguish having nothing ready to put on the page from having nothing happening within me.
The useful question is not only “How much have I written?” It is also “What am I beginning to understand, and what is becoming worth expressing?”
Practical creativity: imagining the person who must use the idea
The same attention to lived consequences is useful beyond fiction. Let us imagine a hypothetical invention of the cup handle, not an account of its actual history.
A man grabs a cup of very hot water without realising how hot it is. He burns his hand, reflexively lets go, and the cup breaks on the floor. The spilled water scalds his legs. A woman sees this and recognises a problem with the cup’s design. She imagines adding a protrusion, much like a saucepan handle, so that a person can grip the cup without holding its hot body. She mentally tries using the modified cup. Further refinement produces a more usable handle.
The important move is not simply inventing an unusual shape. It is anticipating what happens when someone with a sensitive hand, limited grip and ordinary reflexes uses the object. The design would still need testing: a handle that becomes too hot, breaks or is difficult to grip may create another problem.
This is not communication with the cup. It is imagining a human experience. Communication enters when we ask users about their difficulties, show them a proposed improvement and revise it in response to what they say and do.
Four levels of awareness in practical creativity
- Recognise the setting: What physical and social constraints does the person face, including resources, freedom of movement, time, authority and cooperation?
- Understand the lived consequences: What does the situation cost the person in effort, discomfort, attention or lost opportunities?
- Recognise an alternative: Could something make the situation more desirable for the person living through it?
- Become motivated to act: What would move someone from recognising that possibility to attempting an improvement?
Mopping a floor, for example, uses time and physical effort. Someone who barely notices fatigue or places a different value on the time may evaluate the activity differently. Someone else may enjoy it. “I would like this improvement” does not establish that another person would.
A trap I want autistic readers to watch for is jumping straight to the third and fourth levels. We imagine an ideal improvement and want to create it without first understanding the existing constraints and their human cost. The resulting plan quietly assumes a perfect world with unlimited resources and no social obstacles.
Art and self-expression can be worthwhile ends in themselves. A practical solution has an additional obligation: it must work for someone. Our satisfaction with what we created cannot substitute for its usefulness to the person who must live with it.
Four mistakes that keep an invention inside our head
1) Possessing an idea instead of developing its usefulness: Being first to imagine something does not automatically make us the person who makes it work or earns recognition for it. Insisting that others implement the idea exactly as we imagined it can obstruct its development. Guarding an undeveloped possibility like an irreplaceable treasure is not the same as creating something useful.
This does not mean intellectual property is imaginary. Copyright protects expression rather than the underlying idea; qualifying inventions may receive patent protection, and confidential know-how may qualify for trade-secret protection. Public disclosure can jeopardise patent options, so obtain appropriate advice before revealing a potentially patentable invention. Protect what genuinely needs protection while doing the work that makes the idea useful.
2) Holding back our best because we fear having nothing left: Sharing worthwhile work allows others to recognise our talents and challenges us to develop further. Treating one insight as our last irreplaceable treasure can prevent us from discovering what else we can do. There can still be sound strategic reasons to delay disclosure while implementing a project, particularly when others could execute it faster or with more resources. The distinction is between purposeful protection and fear that prevents a meaningful contribution.
3) Treating invention as the whole contribution: An idea does not entitle us to other people’s labour or all the rewards of a finished product. Development, testing, financing, production, distribution and support are real contributions. If we expect others to do all that while reserving the credit and rewards for ourselves, why should they work with us? We need not personally perform every role, but we must contribute something useful, understand the wider solution and recognise the people completing it. They are not props serving our supposed genius.
4) Inventing before the surrounding conditions are ready: A flying car needs more than the ability to leave the ground. Can its users learn to operate it, or trust its automation? Where can it take off and land? How will it be maintained? Are the costs and risks acceptable? These questions are part of the invention’s practical setting, not distractions from the idea.
Edison’s 1913 Kinetophone, which combined projected film with recorded sound, illustrates the problem. The National Park Service describes the difficulty of keeping its projector and phonograph synchronised. The system could work with specialised engineers operating it, but proved too complicated when handed over to ordinary theatre operators. A convincing demonstration is not necessarily a solution ready for everyday use.
Being ahead of our time is not automatically a mistake. We may be doing research or helping to build the missing conditions. The mistake is assuming those conditions already exist when planning an immediate practical success.
What will people actually be able and willing to do with this, under the conditions in which they live? That question helps move creativity out of the convenient World inside our head.
Bringing my Humanity into the World
For me, understanding human life required more than observing Earthlings from outside. I had to accept that I was one of them: a person with a body, limited time, desires and choices, living among others who had their own.
I describe this as accepting my identity as an “Earthling”. I had always been human. What changed was my participation in that human existence. My characters stopped being props, and writing became a way to bring my Humanity out of myself.
For another autistic person, the route may be different. The possibility I want to share is that an activity can become more than a hobby or a means of earning a living. It can help us enter an aspect of Life that explanations alone have not made real.
Breaking free from a limitation does not require becoming NeuroTypical. It can mean gaining a way to participate that we were unaware of. Story writing became such a way for me. It may be a way for you too.
A paragraph is an arrow
It should be made in a way
That it can travel through space and time
To hit the heart of the matter