Why I Write What I Write
I’m very neurodivergent.
At no point in my life has the concept of normality made any sense to me. At no time in my life have I ever considered that any one perspective could accurately reveal all that is going on.
I was born early in the 1960s. This was a dangerous time to be neurodivergent. The prevailing psychological theories focused on a single model of mental health and deemed any divergence from this as likely being caused by trauma (usually childhood trauma) or because of some fundamental corruption of the mind. The concept that different minds think differently and have different needs and interests was not on the table.
I’m not going to go into the really bad stuff. Instead I’ll point out that the fact that I found being around too many people a strain to deal with was dealt with by a psychiatrist having me join a sport even though I hated every part of it.
There’s a long rant here that I’ll leave off. What I do want to point out is that there was not yet language to honestly talk about what I was thinking and how I was understanding the world and other people.
In many ways the language is still lacking, but it is evolving into useful spaces.
My primary early interest was in math and logic. This was in part a result of hanging around my older sister, who became a mathematician, and my older brother, who became a physicist.
As far as math is concerned the era I was born in was a fortunate one because of how the meaning of the word “axiom” had changed.
For more than 2000 years, an axiom was defined as something so obvious it had to be true.
Fortunately, by the time I started learning math this concept had been replaced, so that axioms became those things that one was positing in order to explore or model something.
Euclid’s axioms were no longer considered obvious truths about the universe (indeed, they had been shown to not even be accurate models of the universe), but were things posited to examine flat space.
To me this meant that axiom systems were things one could play with and explore.
Most of the fiction I read at the time was science fiction and fantasy.
Technically I also read some horror, but I didn’t read it for the feelings of horror and catharsis. I don’t experience catharsis at all. That’s part of my neurodivergence.
I read all of these for the world building, what worlds with what implications were these authors making. They had posited things and explored the implications.
I did not, unfortunately, ask the question why did they posit what they posited. As a result I read a lot of SFF that was sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, colonialist, and so many other harmful things.
I missed all of that because I was looking at the questions counterfactually. If this was so, what would happen? Young me did not consider why these things were what these people were positing.
I also read histories and mythologies, again as matters of world building. And I read and started writing poetry.
And I got into computer programming, which frankly has always been very easy for me. This was again a matter of neurodivergence, which was white-washed with the useless term “talented”.
When TTRPGs came out I got into them, focusing on world building as exploration. I got into the fun of sharing in worlds through games.
In college I met people who shared some of my interests, but not my ways of thinking, and that worked out well. I found that talking about things with people whose perspectives and ways of thinking were unlike mine, who were interested in conversing, not convincing or being convinced, was the best thing for me.
I also met my wife there. Her ways of thinking are very different from mine. She’s a skilled visual artist and scientific illustrator. She taught me that everything humans do is art. She showed me a very different way to approach history and to not let society tell me how I look or how I should pretend to act.
Because of that we have both expanded our ways of thinking and regions of enjoyment. Our unlikenesses overlap, entangle and expand out.
This is what got me fully into writing, the idea of exploring conceptions of how things might work through the overlap of worlds and diverse ways of thinking. What I make and write comes from the surprises that come from such overlaps.
Writing is the art that has the easiest time playing with, exploring, and revealing the insides of things.
I have used it to explore what the worlds people thought they lived in might have been like, to explore different conceptions of mind and action, to bring multiple world conceptions together, to form alien life and inhuman spirits around ways of thinking that are fringe to human thinking or buried deep in the ways some of us think.
I have brought together worlds and world views in different structures of interaction in order to see what can be done with these comings-together.
I have co-written with my brother David nonfiction books about physics and math that are also about the scientific and mathematical ways of thinking.
And I have written a book about Computer Programming as Art, not because these are different perspectives but because people are taught that they are incompatible world views. The two do not need to blend. They are already blended. The problem is the cultural barriers artificially created.
I don’t write much about tearing down the social barriers and language problems that make people unsafe and looked down upon. There are many writers doing that and doing a good job of it. I do write about worlds where those problems do not exist, because exploring such concepts is a different writing task from writing the breaking down itself.
Right now I am working on a fantasy TTRPG and a novel in the setting of that TTRPG that explores and plays with humor as a transformative form of magic.
I’m also writing a large program, the purpose of which I cannot yet articulate.
And that’s not a problem. Art is made the back of the mind by what the late Terry Pratchett called The Better Writer in the Back of the Mind.
For me that better writer is the source of all my poems. They always jump out abruptly, showing me what I’ve been thinking about.
Art made this way can surprise and delight the artist. It can also, hopefully, surprise and delight their audience.
