We’d like to thank Meg Eden Kuyatt for this blog post! A previous version of this article was published in the Jan/Feb 2023 issue of Writer’s Digest as a Five Minute Memoir.
“I can’t connect with your characters.”
I kept hearing the same feedback and was baffled. I was a character-driven writer. How could I mess up the one thing I was supposed to be good at? Like Anne of Green Gables, I sank into the depths of despair. But then I went back to the page. I was stubborn and determined to convince my agent that these characters were real. After all, I knew they were real. My protagonist Lotus had lived inside me for years. I just needed to clarify her on the page. Then readers would understand, we’d sell this book, and Lotus would finally be out in the world.
I wrote and edited for a year, trying to respond to this agent’s questions and feedback. But Lotus’ personality began to disappear. Her commentary and humor were stripped off the page, as this agent found it distracting. I tried to have her make “better” decisions, wear smarter fashion, and have more friends, as my agent said she acted “immature” and was “isolated.” In the process, I felt like I was losing Lotus, the character I fell in love with in the first place. The very reason I was writing the book. And when this agent ultimately parted ways with me, I felt like I had failed. I had failed to convince her of Lotus’ authenticity as a character, of her humanity. Now with time and distance, I realize what really happened: I tried to fit Lotus into a neurotypical mold to please my agent. And as a result, Lotus lost her Lotus-ness.
When that agent discouraged me from writing Lotus as autistic, she gave reasons that made sense to me at the time. The story was about an abusive relationship, and the agent said that would make Lotus seem more “vulnerable” or an “obvious victim.” I didn’t want Lotus to seem vulnerable. In that way, her comment baffled me. Lotus’ autism is what makes her powerful, I tried to explain. Anything but vulnerable. But from a neurotypical perspective, Lotus’ autism could only be seen as a weakness, and her abusive relationship as only an exploitation of her “vulnerability.”
Unsure of how to convince my agent of the inherent strength and power autistic women hold, I began to write Lotus as “neurotypical.” And I failed miserably. After all, what do I know about being neurotypical? My whole life, autism was my default. Not being diagnosed until 2020, I assumed the way I saw the world was “normal.” Trying to write about how neurotypical people see the world is writing outside of my lived experience, as I don’t think I ever successfully completely absorbed how others expect me to see the world. I’m sure it’s entirely possible for an autistic writer to write an authentic neurotypical character, as neurotypicality is the dominant culture in our current world, but it became clear that that is not a particular strength of mine.
My current agent encourages me to write from my neurodivergent experience. With this invitation, I revisited Lotus and gave myself permission to see her the way I first wrote her. I also gave myself permission to see the other protagonist, her friend Prue, as autistic as well—something I never actually let myself do before. And when I did, the characters and the entire narrative began to make more sense. It explained why Prue didn’t understand the advances of a boy at her church. Why she froze, unable to speak about her sexual assault. Why Lotus impulsively posts about Prue’s assault, trying to help but ultimately making everything much, much worse.
Identifying my characters as neurodivergent not only gives me joy as a writer, but it’s produced some of my strongest writing. My debut middle-grade novel-in-verse Good Different is my first book where I explicitly identify my protagonist as autistic, and it was the easiest book I’ve ever written. I was afraid writing about my autism would be too specific, and not resonate with neurotypical readers, but the opposite has proven true. Autistic readers have identified with the book, and neurotypical readers have expressed that it’s helped them better understand an autistic perspective.
For so long, I’ve combatted the advice to “write what I know,” in part because I didn’t know what I actually knew. I didn’t know I was neurodivergent. But as I mine the specificity of my personal lived experience, my writing is stronger. There is a power to our lived experience. It’s not a limitation on our craft, but a swinging open of the gates.
Meg Eden Kuyatt teaches creative writing at colleges and writing centers. She is the author of the 2021 Towson Prize for Literature winning poetry collection “Drowning in the Floating World,” the forthcoming “obsolete hill” (Fernwood Press) and children’s novels including the Schneider Family Book Award Honor-winning “Good Different,” and the forthcoming “The Girl in the Walls” (Scholastic, 2025). Find her online at megedenbooks.com.
