Years ago, I was on a panel at Rainfurrest, and the audience asked something about how to get feedback or critiques or beta reads or something. And the answer from the panelists largely came down to something along the lines of, “Get help from your friends.”
Bear with me…
That doesn’t sound like much of an answer, filtered through a decade of hazy memory and shoved into a word-limited tweet, but it was basically the answer that made sense and you’d get from any reasonable writing panel.
However, I heard one audience member say, very quietly…
“What if you don’t have friends?”
And that was my person. That was the person in the room who made sense to me. I tried to tell them to talk to me after the panel, because I had A LOT of thoughts on how to handle that particular problem. I’d been working on it myself for years.
Unsurprisingly, the person who was too awkward to have friends and too awkward to properly mask about it and know “better” than to admit to a roomful of strangers that they didn’t have friends… didn’t come talk to me after the panel.
I wish they had.
At the time, I didn’t know much about autism, but now, I can pretty confidently say that I’m autistic. I’d hazard there’s a decent chance the audience member who I didn’t get a chance to help might have been autistic too. But I really don’t know.
What I do know is this…
I could have spent an hour talking to that person about strategies for how to figure out group and interpersonal dynamics and try to come up with a way to quasi-fit into a space that would allow you access to people who could help you grow with your writing. Easy.
I could write whole threads about it now… but I’m not going to. I don’t want to. It’s exhausting. People are exhausting. I shouldn’t have to teach seminars on human interaction to people as a prerequisite for being able to be a writer. And writers shouldn’t have to take them.
I’ve learned through painful, repeated, studious, studied trial and error how to mask (in the autistic sense) really successfully when I have to or want to. Mostly, these days, I don’t want to. I’d rather write my books alone, connecting only with a few very close people.
So, when writers object to AI programs standing in for beta readers and critique groups, asking, “But why do people need a robot to do that? Isn’t that sad?”
Well, you can think it’s sad. But for some of us, it’s either that or sadly ask, “What if you don’t have friends?”
Let people have their robot friends.