#creative frustrations

As someone who has training in text design and editing, this really bothers me. It looks unprofessional, it impacts readability and it’s just wrong.

It (far too belatedly) clicked to me that I could check to view the post in the HTML editor instead of Rich Text, and there I found the answer: instead of just using standard paragraph tags to start and close paragraphs, Tumblr is throwing in random break tags--<br>--between, before and after some (but not all) paragraphs. If I delete them, the post views correctly on my iPad. Since just about every other website can give us a Rich Text editor without this, and since this wasn’t a problem until they made the site that glaring blue, I’m not happy.

You can compose a post entirely in HTML on Tumblr, but ... well, Tumblr’s HTML editor isn’t a happy fun time post composing experience.

For folks who have this problem, I recommend composing your post as normal in Rich Text, and then opening your post in HTML (go to the gear in the post’s top left corner, go to “text editor” and select HTML) to check for the break tag. Hit Control+F for your browser’s search bar to come up and type the tag--<br>--into the bar. This way you can quickly search through the post, remove the tags and then go back to check your post in Rich Text. An alternative is to compose your post in another Rich Text editor--I do my fiction posts on WordPress--and then copy and paste it into a Tumblr post, as opposed to composing it directly in Tumblr.

I will observe that sometimes (not always, but sometimes) read more cuts and section dividers placed in a post get eaten in the process of moving from Rich Text to HTML, but if you have a post with basic formatting, it shouldn’t look any different. (And I don’t mind replacing these things to have a post with proper paragraphing.)

I’m posting about this here because we as a community have a tendency to longer text discussion posts, not to mention our poetry and fiction writers. This is, of course, an example of just how broken Tumblr is, and we really shouldn’t have to be doing this to fix a function that didn’t have this problem last year, but there is a solution if it’s been bothering you.

And now I’m going to be spending some time in going back and editing my recent posts, because I cannot convey how much this annoys me.

Thanks so much for your best wishes, anon! For me, it comes down to three different factors, although not all autistics will have these in common, many autistics will have a different arrangement of primary senses, and neurodiverse folk who aren’t autistic or neurotypicals may have some or all of them! With this sort of thing, when folks connect to my experiences, I usually consider it an indication that autism may be worth exploring if you haven’t already, but because neurodiversity has so many similar expressions attached to several diagnoses, not to mention the possibility of comorbid or accompanying diagnoses, it doesn’t mean others should be excluded, either.

(I’m wary of making the yes, you’re absolutely autistic because I am pronouncements, because neurodiversity is such a broad and complex field and the only experiences I can speak for, at the end of the day, are my own. In me, they’re attached to this label; in others, they may not be.)

The first is that I have almost no ability to visualise images inside my head (aphantasia). I have more of an abstract knowledge of what things are--for example, I can tell you that Mum has wavy blond hair and crinkles around her eyes and she looks now like Oma (my grandmother) did in my early childhood, but I have no corresponding image of what she (or Oma!) looks like inside my head. I don’t have any visual sense without looking at her right in front of me. I don’t see a red apple in my head; I sort of think that it will have a brown stalk at the top and green shading around the stalk and the apple curves in at the bottom. The best I get as a mental picture is a red, circular blob, and for non-simple objects or scenes, not even that much. When I think of my room, for example, I list the things within it and their details rather than imagine them.

(I also have prosopagnosia, difficulty recognising faces, and while I can make eye-contact if I feel safe, I’d much rather not. It feels … it feels uncomfortable and rude and painful all at once in ways I struggle to describe. This makes fictional descriptions of people difficult for me, because I tend to interpret mood based on movement, word choice and tone of voice, not facial expressions or arrangement of facial features. As for distinguishing features, like size of nose or lips? I just don’t notice these at all.)

For this reason, when I attempt to write a scene, I have no picture of said scene in my head. None. I’m building it instead from an abstract knowledge of small details and how I think they might fit together, and while reference pictures can help, I’m rarely able to put it together the way allistic critique partners have asked of me. I’ll note that I know a few allistics with aphantasia, including one of the people who frustrated me most about wanting more description, so other people don’t seem to find it so much of a problem.

The second is that, like many autistics, I have more of a small detail sensibility–in other words, I see small details before I see the whole scene together, if I do at all. For me, a busy street scene is footsteps clattering on the pavement, the smell of petrol and perfume, music blaring from shop doorways, the screech of breaks as a car stops, the reflection on the wet asphalt as the lights change. It’s not the larger structure of the street and shops or the amount of people and cars occupying the street. The whole is suggested, for me, by the way the pieces of the small fit together.

Many allistics have read my work telling me to “describe more”, and I’m baffled, because I described the smell of the smoke and the rust of the metal and how the lift-cage creaked! How much more description do they want? Do I have to describe the shape of each flake of rust or something? I suspect it has to do with their passing over the smaller details I’ve provided in search of a missing big-picture description, while I’m just adding more and more smaller details to paint the scene, not realising that there’s anything missing–and to this day, I have no idea how to provide what they want. I don’t experience the world that way.

The third is that the world I experience is shaped more by touch, sound, taste, movement and smell than sight, more than is normal for most abled allistics. I’m better at non-visual small details than I am visual small-details. In a world where film and television have changed so much about what is expected from prose, especially genre/non-literary prose, this means my work isn’t as accessible as expected–it lacks that easily-visualised sensibility. I tend to describe how people move over depicting colour, for example, as this is something I’m more sensitive to as a stimmer. The feel of a cloth is something more natural to me to describe than its pattern.

All those things together means that my work describes things that aren’t expected to be described while leaving a lot that is expected to be described undescribed, and so far no writing teacher or crit partner has been able to explain precisely what they mean by describe more. It’s obvious to them; it’s a mystery to me. In the last couple of years, I’ve been slowly working on trying to build my descriptions and setting in ways that feel real and meaningful to me–to write how I think is natural as an autistic. There’s a lot of rules of prose to work through to try and find whatever my authentic autistic voice is underneath, though, and I’m nowhere near finished in this process.

So it’s important to me that someone else understands that my goal isn’t to make my work fit allistic expectations of description. It’s to try and better use tools of description to paint the world as I know it, so allistics can peer in and see how things look like to me–even if that image is focusing on the feel and smell of a soft wool blanket against a blurry, vague background. So I suppose my challenge is one of learning how to better convey that these gaps in my description are not a mistake but are instead the nature of my worldview–to give them a more easily-perceived sense of intentionality. I am absolutely not yet there, but I’ll keep trying.

I hope that gives you some idea, anon, from where I’m coming, but it’s worth keeping in mind that this is the combination of autism and writing for me. Just as there’s so many different shapes of autism, there’s so many different shapes of how autism interacts with writing, too.

As a person whose existence is pretty much this, I have quite the thoughts on this subject, thoughts that will naturally require far too many words! And not to worry about the asking: we’re creators here, too. Yes, it’s an aro blog, but it’s an aro creativity blog, and I think it’s important that aro-spec creators know that other aro-spec creators have the same struggles and difficulties as creatives, and feel safe in opening up conversation about it. We’re here to support each other, I hope, in making and celebrating aro-spec narratives, and it’s going to be hard for those narratives to exist if we’re not talking and connecting over our creative struggles as well.

It might take a couple of days, though, because it’s something that I’m quite passionate about, so it’s going to need a process of my throwing words on the screen and then winnowing them down to something that is useful as opposed to merely emotive. I can give you emotion very easily, but constructive, I suspect, will be a bit more useful.

If it helps in the meantime, anon: you’re not alone, and I don’t think I’ve had a single day where I haven’t felt this. (You all have no idea just how much of a blubbering wreck I am behind the keyboard, honestly.) Hold tight to why you write, the what of you want to say. If you don’t know why, consider this an invitation to start exploring the reasons. The more you know about why you want to write, the easier it is to fight a lying brain (and it is lying to you, so well it’s hard to recognise). There are other things I’ll talk about, but central to everything is developing a sense of why you want to write, what you have to say and why that matters. (And it does! There’s a community here proving that!) Aro-spec folks have struggles in feeling heard and a lack of representation, but we have the strongest motivation to create because of it--and a community ready and waiting to support us in doing so.

neirtome replied to your post “I’m working on one of my two pieces (called Love is the Reckoning)....”

Everything you've said here is really relatable, and so humbling. Explaining who you are when you're using almost a different language is so awkward to bridge, and to write, because definitions almost certainly change per person. Writing it one way doesn't make a template we can reuse the next time a character comes out in a similar way (or even with identical terms)! Thanks for sharing this, because I have definitely experienced this as well. :)

Your words made my day. Or, more correctly, they made my yesterday, since I didn’t get all my responding done yesterday! Thank you, thank you so very much. Thank you.

But oh, yes! Identity, and the needs and language and experiences that surround it, are so individualised. There really isn’t a template, just some blundering in the dark, and we’re all trying to figure out how to say what needs saying within the constraints of characterisation and narrative, while knowing that much of the audience isn’t accustomed to this language.

(This is why writing just for aros is so fun--I’ve still got that short story I need to post. There’s no explanation of what things are; I’ll post it here just for folks already speaking the language. It was so enjoyable to write for this reason!)

There’s so little conversation on being aro-spec to begin with, so talking about what it feels and means to tell stories as an aro-spec is just this silence. Even if I’m rambling at you all, I like to break it every so often, to talk about the things that make me hesitate or struggle. We’re all out here building worlds out of dreams; I think it’s important to talk about the unexpected things that make it hard. Because we’re told to just go and make the representation we want to see, as though it’s simply a matter of throwing in an aro-spec character, but it can’t be. Being aro-spec (or anything else) shapes what and how we make.

I’ve been trying to do new things with my cards.  I’ve been playing with heat embossing, I’ve been trying new styles of writing, I’ve been trying new ways to create backgrounds...

While everything seems to be ok, I just don’t feel like they are good enough to be added to my shop.  I know I definitely need more work and practice before I create something that I feel is worth selling. 

I’d love to expand my products, add new things, change the line up.. but I just feel so inadequate.  It’s definitely frustrating..