In this quiet yet illuminating essay at The Yale Review, essayist Steve Edwards reflects on how an autism diagnosis changed the way he saw himself, as well as his relationship to writing.
It was important to me that the last word of the longer paragraphs was farther to the righthand side of the page than the last word of the shorter paragraphs, but not so far as to crowd the edge. Flip any printed draft on its side and ideally what you would see was a kind of wave—like the graphic display of an audio file—that rose and dipped with changes in the story’s tempo and dynamic. I knew these rules didn’t actually matter. I knew if whatever I was working on got published, the formatting would change anyway. But it was a puzzle to solve. I imagined myself a wild quilter cutting up different-sized strips of fabric, laying out sentences in increasingly complex sequences and patterns, stitching them together, standing back, assessing and reassessing the whole. I got so good at counting lines it became second nature. It was meticulous and painstaking work. It left no room in my head for shame.
For years I had built a persona around imagining myself a novelist. I had worked to convince myself and others that, soon enough, I would emerge from my self-imposed exile transformed, with a literary masterpiece in hand. But one day, after an ordinary morning’s work, I saved the giant file containing my novel, hit close, and never opened it again.
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