Research

I don’t generally do much research.

Most of what I write comes from memory and imagination, neither of which are accessible via Google or Wikipedia. I am a stickler for technical details, though. If I’m writing about a particular actual place like the Archbishop’s residence in Palmer Woods, I exercise due diligence to get the details right. 

The house passed out of the hands of the Catholic Church in the late 1980s, but it is still more or less intact. John Sulley the basketball player owned it for a while, then it passed into the hands of a local religious group. There are photos of the interior on the web, and at least one movie was made there, so reference material is available. Usually, I only need a few details, like the Pewabic tiles and the carved fireplace in the Archbishop’s office, to set a scene.

Writing about autism is another story.

I have some general information accumulated from movies like Rainman, Mercury Rising and Temple Grandin, but I need to know how much of that is popular mythology and how much is fact.

Autistic people are unique individuals with  wildly varying degrees of quirkiness and normality. In the latest DSM, autism and Asperger syndrome have been renamed autism spectrum disorder, to accommodate the range of symptoms and behaviors.

In addition to the autobiographies of Temple Grandin and Donna Williams, I’m reading a translation of Asperger’s dissertation which includes multiple case studies. On the web, I’ve found a variety of comments from autistic and Asperger’s people, one of whom communicates almost entirely through text-to-speech on her computer, as I was imagining for my character. I haven’t seen any accounts of early infancy for autistic people. For them, introspective life begins around age three. Before that, they may be like other infants, or if they are different. No one can really tell.

So far, my initial impressions have been supported. The syndromes are often marked by intensity of sensation. They tend to behave as though other people don’t exist. They are often brilliant in their chosen fields of interest. They are often marked by phenomenal memory. They resist teaching, but often create original solutions to problems that interest them.

This remains a story I can work with. I’m still not qualified to write it, but what novelist is?