Annie Mare (she/they) writes queer contemporary young adult romance and cowrites queer romance and mysteries with her wife, Ruthie Knox. Mare lives with her wife, two teenagers, two dogs, multiple fish, one cat, four hermit crabs, and a bazillion plants in a very old house with a garden.

I’m a full-time writer, autistic, and have anxiety and depression.

If that sounds hard, you’re right, it is, but it’s not hard because of who I am.

Publishing is a high-rejection industry with unspoken rules. Long silences followed by sudden, high-pressure conversations, unexpected deadlines, or big changes are common. Even when writers are lucky enough to work with supportive editors and agents, there is no way to publish books without at least sometimes feeling disappointment and pain, and this can be compounded if you’re a writer with multiple marginalizations.

As my therapist likes to remind me, when people get hurt for reasons they can’t fully understand, we blame ourselves so we can have an answer.

However, when our answer is our autistic traits, or how we cope and manage our mental health, or how we focus and think, it means we’re sacrificing who we are to explain why we’ve been hurt by an industry that wasn’t made with us in mind.

Internalized ableism is real, and it gets very, very real for neurodivergent writers.

Masking Doesn’t Protect Us

We mask to disguise our neurodivergent traits so we can survive in publishing. Instructions on how we should behave are ubiquitous, but this advice centers allistic perspectives, reinforcing the belief that masking is necessary to a writing career. This may feel especially true to those of us who have suffered fallout from conflict, meltdowns, missed deadlines, or accusations of unprofessional behavior.

But forcing ourselves to resemble an allistic fantasy of the ideal writer is what harms us. Masking leads to frustration and burnout. Only if we center and accommodate our neurodivergence do we open up pathways to sustainable creative careers that are ours.

This Chair Hurts My Feelings

Basics first! Are you comfortable? Do you get restless, fidgety, or irritable when you’re writing? Do you have ongoing and diffuse physical complaints? Try flexible seating—wobble stools, wiggle seats, balance balls, bounce straps for your feet, kneeling chairs, rocking and straddle seats, standing desks, bean bags, or inflatable cushions that provide sensory feedback with texture. You’ll want more than one. The idea is to give yourself different ways to move and rest so that your brain isn’t overwhelmed by covert signals of discomfort. Try using a timer to remind you when to switch seats.

Hold On, Let Me Get My Fidget Cube So I Can Hear You

Speaking of timers, try movement breaks! Stimming is a beautiful part of neurodivergence. Giving ourselves permission to stim in our writing spaces is one of the first steps to unmasking. It regulates our nervous systems and provides important information about our bodies. If suppressing stimming has been a part of your masking for a long time, it may feel strange to take a short break from writing to allow your body to move exactly how it wants to. Try pacing at first, or stretching large muscle groups, and follow your body’s lead from there. Music or noise-cancelling headphones can help; so can low lighting.

OOTD: Headphones, Soft Pants, and My Good Socks

Neurodivergent people take in as much as 300 percent more sensory information than allistic people. When there is too much to process, the overload can lead to physical symptoms like migraines, shutdowns, or meltdowns. Do you work best in complete silence? Do you require a certain color or quality of light? What kind of clothes are you most comfortable working in? There are a lot of assessment forms available for free on the internet to help you break down your sensory needs. A sensory-safe workspace gives you somewhere to genuinely recharge, keeps your nervous system regulated, and teaches you more about your needs so that you can identify the most critical sensory tools to take with you wherever you go (for example, headphones, fidgets, tinted glasses, or special clothing).

If That’s What My Editor Meant, Why Didn’t She Just Say So?

But how do we accommodate the act of writing itself? Neurodivergent writers may struggle with distraction, demand avoidance, and intense self-doubt that make writing or revising daunting. Two tools that can separate a lot of the obstacles here are translation and scribing.

Translation accommodates allistic communication styles. Before you read your edit letters, assignments given to you by marketing—anything, really, that has proven to make you fight, freeze, fawn, or flee—give these documents to your translator. This should be a person you readily understand and have no inhibitions about asking for clarification. Ask them to tell you the tone of the correspondence and to spell out any “hidden” rules or expectations. Have them provide you with summaries of required work. Your translator may give you this information in writing or verbally. If you like, they can body double you when you’re working on a response, helping you to formulate any follow-up questions or concerns.

Many neurodivergent writers have high levels of empathy that mean that we may try to deeply analyze communication and edit notes, take in many layers of nuance, look for patterns, lose ourselves to research, and otherwise make our process more complex or rich with feelings. Translators can listen and scale for importance or direct us to a more manageable task plan. (This issue is also something we can take to our therapists for a goal-oriented session that helps us decide what to do next.)

My Brain Is Typing Faster Than My Fingers

It’s not uncommon for neurodivergent people to find it easier to write aloud than to type their stories or ideas on a keyboard—or for us to switch back and forth depending on the writing task at hand. Scribing is an accommodation for when it is challenging to get written words down in a document. A scribe can be a person or a speech-to-text tool. In either case, your scribe records everything you express verbally, producing a document that you can edit. A human scribe may type in notes as you talk through revisions or edits you’d like to make to your work, or they may follow your instructions to put those edits in, move and delete sections, and make in-text notes for you. Sometimes this type of scribing may incorporate translation as well. A scribe may be physically present or may work with you in a shared document virtually.

We’re Supposed to Take Care of Each Other

Ableism tells us that dependence on others is bad, and so translation and scribing may feel like too much to ask of another person. However, I would suggest working toward the idea of interdependence. Writing doesn’t have to be a solitary pursuit. It often works better when it isn’t. What’s more, translators and scribes benefit from working with you, improving their own communication skills and gaining insight into connecting to different neurotypes. In our increasingly exclusive and authoritarian world, there is great value in such practices of mutual care.

I Wrote 10,000 Words Yesterday, and in My Next Writing Session, I Will Beat Elden Ring

There is a lot of messaging in the writing world about word count goals and the merit of daily writing. But when is it an ideal time for your brain and body to meet your goals easily? Many neurodivergent people experience periods of tremendous output and hyperfocus followed by periods that are quiet or routine. Because this pattern is largely unsupported in capitalistic contexts, we tend to mask and force ourselves to work—or we don’t, but we feel shame for not working, and our mental health takes a hit.

Give yourself permission to follow your own pattern and support your process with intention. If you know you have a pattern of hyperfocus and high production followed by quiet times, think about what you can take off your plate to let your brain work unimpeded. Then, when times are quiet, nurture and accommodate your needs so that you can more fully unmask, rest, and grow more secure in yourself. Or perhaps you’re someone who does best with very short and limited sessions. If so, surrender yourself fully to the pattern. If you thrive when you have secure routines, protect those routines fiercely. The more your working pattern is supported, the more sustainable your writing career will be, and the more examples the world will have of valid working styles. This helps everyone.

Can I Tell You Everything about Marine Invertebrates?

One accommodation that can demonstrate the amazing rewards of unmasking is fully indulging our special interests and hobbies. A willingness to explore the depth and breadth of topics, hobbies, skills, and subjects is a rich matrix for hitting on amazing and fresh book ideas. Fully surrendering to periods where a special interest is intense is a great way to support neurodivergence and encourage more joyful work when writing.

If I’m Too Much, Let Them Go Find Less

I would love it if publishing embraced and nurtured its neurodivergent creatives, and if publishing professionals got curious about how they might better support the neurodivergent writers they work with. In the meantime, though, remember that our books don’t benefit from our figuring out how to be less.

Our best books come from when we’re more. More of everything us.

Accommodating our environments, fully supporting our sensory needs, exploring mutual interdependence, and respecting our work patterns and special interests are all ways to support full expression of our neurodivergence so that we can access our creative gifts without succumbing to burnout or harming our mental health.

Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon by Annie Mare

Tressa Fay leads a predictable life that is starting to feel a little stale, until one day, she gets a text message from someone named Meryl. After some flirtatious texting, Tressa Fay and Meryl plan to meet, but when Meryl does show, Tressa Fay shrugs it off. Then, a group of Meryl’s friends burst into the salon, telling Tressa Fay that Meryl has been missing for a month. The fast friends put their stories together and discover the reality of a multiverse, and how they may be running out of time to find their friend.

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