4:41pm February 5, 2012

On receiving unsolicited writing advice. Short version: Please just don’t.

I’ve tried writing this so many ways and fucked up so many times trying to say what I mean, and not say what I don’t mean.

I don’t come to tumblr to improve my writing.

Despite the fluency of my writing, I have a serious, lifelong communication impairment. All kinds of complex and difficult things go into my writing. Things you can’t see unless you’re really familiar with this kind of difficulty.

It’s not just having to turn thoughts into words. It’s having to hold back all the wrong (but often utterly coherent and plausible) words that want to come out in their place. One slip and there’s a paragraph or more of nonsense – that’s often tricksy enough to look like sense. One person with similar difficulties described it as the difference between slowly learning to ride a horse (ordinary speech delay) and trying to get a bucking bronco to go where you want (the particular kind of messy receptive and expressive language development I had). It’s trying to simultaneously come up with the right words and suppress the wrong ones – often compromising by weaving them together. It’s really hard. Especially for someone who can’t multitask well.

Tumblr is where I go to relax. Where the only language stuff I try to correct is the typos and the wrongly chosen words.

Another fun part of being autistic is this weird kind of perception that I only just heard the right words for the other day. It is not about missing the big picture. It’s about seeing a big picture that is so intimately tied to the details that changing one piece changes everything.

That means no, I can’t easily just take what you see as an unnecessary tangent, remove it from the post, and make it into another post. To me, that “tangent” is an absolutely necessary explanation of something that wouldn’t otherwise be clear at all.

I understand that this makes for objectively bad writing.

I don’t go to tumblr to do objectively good writing. I go here to write like I write without having to worry about stuff like that.

The only effect that your telling me that my writing would be “stronger” if I did something to it that seems more or less easy to you? Is to either drive me into shutdown or meltdown trying to do it “right” (something I generally only reserve for formal occasions), or to make me afraid to write here.

I understand this can make my writing hard to follow. Hell, I often can’t read my own writing. But I can’t expend that level of energy every time I want to write something. And that’s can’t. Not just don’t want to. Because I have a limited amount of energy in a day. Really limited. And I can’t spend it all on writing this stuff.

I know this may seem like overreaction. But for a lot of reasons I’m not even capable of articulating, it’s not. Not with my particular personal history and a bunch of other specifics I don’t know how to name. Including writing being my primary form of communication, and tumblr being more about that than formal writing, but that’s not even close to all of it. I just have to be really clear – I can’t do this. Not like that. I’m truly sorry for any comprehension trouble it causes. But I’m doing as well as I safely can, given all kinds of factors.

And I’m really not looking for writing critiques here. Disagreement, that’s fine, but unsolicited writing advice, please, please just don’t.

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