I also have Asperger Syndrome. Before I explain how I "write around it", let me talk a little about showing and telling.

Writing isn't what it used to be, and I don't mean that in a bad way. In competing with film and TV for people's attention, novels have started to mimic the way such media tell a story through what can be seen and heard. True, good writing mentions other senses too; but the lesson has been that revealing inner mental states is unnecessary in good story-telling. I won't rehearse the arguments for why you should show rather than tell; this question wasn't about how good such advice is.

OK, so how do we do it?

Modern writers have grown up in an environment where most of the stories they consume are from film and TV, where characters' visible and audible mannerisms show us what they're feeling. As an Aspie, I can understand such inferences don't come easily in real-life interactions. But with fiction, several factors make it easier: the fact that there's a plot with a well-defined beginning, middle and end, providing enough context to infer mental states another way; the fact you can rewind and replay as much as you need to notice little details; and the fact that fictional characters have authors behind them, trying to make their mental-physical correlations as clear as possible and, in particular, as close as possible to the rest of the fiction they and their audience has consumed.

Does this mean I'd expect you to pass a written exam on what each kind of body language means? No, I understand your situation better than that. Even if you "know" the right answer, it can be hard to put into words. But don't worry! You don't actually need to be able to do that. All you need to do is visualize the scene. You can do this whether you're writing a script intended for TV, or a very different format you can imagine getting such an adaptation.

When I visualize my characters doing things, I'll be honest: my brain doesn't invent their appearances ex nihilo. Usually I take fictional characters I know from other visual works, then "recast" them. (The characters I choose might actually contradict how I said my own characters look; it doesn't matter.) But in my mind, I can see new footage they've never been in before, where they do what my plot says they do. OK. What's their body language like when I do that? Unsurprisingly, roughly what other writers would make it, because I've seen so much of how that turns out. My brain has become ingrained with some patterns, even if I don't know what they are, just as I don't need to solve equations to throw a ball.

So before you write the next minute or so of your characters' interactions, close your eyes and try to see them doing it. I'll let you decide whether you need to say their dialogue out loud, and if so where you'll quietly do it. Maybe you'll find this easiest to do at night in your dreams. That's not important: you do you. But as you see it all, your brain will invent body language. It will; it can't help it. So no matter how little you understand that body language, write it down. (If a reader can double-check that it seems natural, that's all the better.) Saying what a character did in one sentence and what they said in another is a popular, and these days arguably indispensable, alternative to traditional dialogue tags, where dangerous telling most frequently arises with writers who know they'll need to work on it.

Now, you may find you see too much body language to remember it all, or to feel it should all be there. Yeah, that's fine too. If you tell me in one example what eyebrows did and in another what hands did and in another where a character's gaze went, that's rich; if you tell me all of them every time, that's boring, like you're filling in every column of a spreadsheet. Note what strikes you most.

A few years ago, I came across Stephenie Meyer's characters' tendency to sigh. I realized one of my novels had a lot of sighing. So I re-read those sections and tried visualizing the scenes again, and noticed every sigh meant something different. Then I visualized them yet again, with the meaning first and foremost, and found the body language changed to something different each time. (Well, OK; I think I visualized each scene twice before moving onto the next one, rather than going through the whole sequence twice, but still.) That did my writing wonders. But you can save this sort of tactic to your redrafting.

I'm a professional scientist; my point of view might help. The only way I can think of is to approach it analytically. Body language is a language you don't know. There are books on it, some contradictory (giving you freedom to choose). The parts you are missing is that instead of understanding the language and becoming fluent (on paper), you are trying to translate one word at a time using a cross-language dictionary. surprise=X. Anger=Y. But of course you know people express surprise, anger, boredom and excitement in many ways. You need to become more fluent in the language than just consulting a Spanish-English dictionary one word at a time.

I like and suggest evolutionary psychology, as well. Emotions in animals and in humans serve a purpose, each one of them, that has (on average) contributed to the survival of each species. Understanding how and why we express various emotions helps you determine when, where and how emotion needs to be injected.

I suggest re-reading some best sellers you personally enjoyed, but in analysis mode. Catalog the ways that author described body language and why, at that moment, it was needed. What was the character feeling?

Sometimes the character wasn't feeling anything particularly strong. Action can be used for no other purpose than breaking up blocks of dialogue, to keep the reader's mental image of the scene from fading. We need to remind the reader that this happening in a place to people! That is one valid purpose of describing body language.

But also, people sigh in frustration, or boredom. It oxygenates the brain, to think harder or just stay conscious.

Parse the book and look for body language. The first step of science is typically classification or categorization if you prefer: grouping similar things together. That is the first step toward generalization. The next step is finding relationships between the groups. What do exultation and anger have in common? Or depression and anger? Anger can be related to both "victory" and "defeat", like exultation and depression. Tears may be expressed in anger, that is because the anger is sometimes accompanied by defeat. Tears may be an expression of surrender; people often cry when they reach a point of accepting that they have lost something they wanted, or been beaten. And crying comes in degrees; from wiping a tear away to full voice sobbing.

You can become more fluent in body language, getting past the "substitution" phase, by studying it for yourself. I've never experienced being a dog, but I have owned and trained dogs my whole life, and I have a pretty good idea of how they think and feel.

You can do that with literature. See where body language is used, what emotion the character was experiencing, and the ways that emotion is being expressed. In best selling books you yourself enjoy. Not to plagiarize them, but to generalize your own understanding of how emotions get expressed bodily, with those body parts, so you can then go from the general to original specific prose.

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First of all, show-don't-tell is overrated. Most of classic fiction and much of current popular fiction tells in abundance. Here is the first sentence from Alice in Wonderland:

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do.

Lewis Carroll tells us that Alice is getting tired, and yet it is one of the most celebrated classics. Show-don't-tell is one possible approach to writing, but not the only one.

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Second, there are different narrative viewpoints, some of which are more subjective and emotional while others are more detached and "sober". There are famous books that do not tell or show much about the characters' emotions.

Advice

I don't think that you need to "fake" emotions or a viewpoint into your narrative that you personally don't have in your life. On the contrary, it will likely become an agonizing effort for you and produce writing that doesn't flow and feels contrived.

Before you blindly follow the advice of a single reader, I would recommend that you take some time to re-read a variety of your most favourite books and try to observe yourself while you do it.

• What do you enjoy most about those books that you miss in others?


• Which aspects of the writing speak most to you?


• How do those books portray their characters?

Read with a writer's eye and learn to write from what you love to read. Derive a how-to-write schema from your most cherished books. That is how you want to write. Attempt to write that way, and with time and many books you will develop your own voice.

I will attempt to guide you through this topic.

Let me start by saying this. I think you're being too hard on yourself because the clichés of how people react in stories is something that we all have to learn anyway, diagnosis or not. We don't usually write as reality is, we write as other people have written. Reality is just the inspiration for it.

What is a cliché?

Things we write are clichés, and writing is all about crafting a long list of written clichés that when put together (people we care about agree) doesn't suck, and isn't just one big cliché as a whole. Figuring out which don't suck, and when and why they don't suck, is very hard for most people and takes years of practice to start figuring out.

The knife sat on the floor, its silver blade stained with blood. Sophia's jaw dropped.

People's jaws very rarely "drop" in real life, yet if it is written like above most understand what it means, and that's why we tend to gloss over it as we read. If, however, a jaw first drops, and then immediately after an eyebrow is raised, and then in the next paragraph a fist is clenched ... then indeed it will be formulaic like you say.

Why?

Start by asking yourself the following question.

What specifically in time and space am I trying to describe?

Every word counts in a story. The starting point is to get yourself a more nuanced understanding of different kinds of situations and what people are thinking and feeling, so that you can imagine your own. Now I understand this might be part of your personal blindspot, but that doesn't mean you can't study typical situations and find some rules of thumbs and principles to eventually build an understanding. Let's break it down.

In the example with the knife, let's say there's a woman who finds it. Let's say it's in her house, and she thought no one had been in there since she left two hours ago. Now, she's walking into her kitchen feeling pretty okay, probably. She might be feeling terrible, but at the very least she's not feeling shocked - yet!

We assume things about how she's feeling (and what she's thinking) as she walks in, because the entire concept of "walking into your kitchen" is itself a cliché, so we know what to expect from her to some degree. She's probably not thinking "oh, I can't wait to ride this horse!" - there's no reason to think there's a horse in there. Similarly, she's probably feeling okay, because she's in her home ... could be worse, right?

Now she sees the knife. It subverts her expectations, because it has blood on it. How she feels and thinks changes, because this is a different kind of cliché than that of "walking into your kitchen" - and it's one she didn't expect, and one that usually means something bad is going on around her.

How do we write better clichés?

Your job here is to make the reader forget that you're describing something to them, and instead focus on what's happening in the story. Compare this knife reaction with the first, simpler one:

The knife sat on the floor, its silver blade stained with blood.

Sophia stopped. Her hand covered her mouth, lingering. Then she jerked back a step, the edge of the table striking her waist, her knees buckling. She shot backward onto the floor, gasping.

This is, if I can say so myself - a much better way to describe her reaction - and significantly more "Show Don't Tell". Let's break down some of what's going on in it!

1. The knife sat on the floor, its silver blade stained with blood.

By describing this knife, we're implying that she's seen it. She's seen the blood. This is the context for what comes next - so we know what she's reacting to.

2. Sophia stopped.

The first step of her reaction is to simply stop. This conveys that she's noticing the knife and is now paying attention to it, which makes sense because she just came from what we're calling "the walking into your kitchen cliché". The stop prepares the reader for the fact that she's about to have a reaction, so if the readers weren't paying attention already, they should be now.

3. Her hand covered her mouth, lingering.

"Covered her mouth" is another well-known cliché, but we're not using it to stand in as her whole reaction, we're using it to describe a part of what's happening in the scene. The gist of Show Don't Tell is exactly this, you describe what's uniquely happening instead of the generic situation. After all, what's a reaction? It's a re-action - an action that follows another. And "lingering" at the end there is a way to signal that she's still processing the scene, because she's pausing in the middle of her reaction.

4. Then she jerked back a step, the edge of the table striking her waist, her knees buckling.

Sophia understands that there might be immediate danger in her home, and the place she assumed was safe isn't. She's panics, and we know this because she's jerking backward. No one jerks backward randomly after seeing a knife, it must have triggered some kind of negatively motivating feeling, right?

We further realize this by how she bumps into the table. She's not paying attention to what's behind her, because all of her attention is on the threatening situation. That's another way we know how overwhelming it is. It even causes her knees to buckle, connected to another cliché of "legs weak by fear". Finally she falls, and when she falls it's backward because she's instinctively moving away from the knife.

5. She shot backward onto the floor, gasping.

Is she gasping because of the knife, or because the table startled her while she was sensitive to threats, or because of falling? Narratively speaking, probably a bit of all three, as it all adds up to her shocking experience. The reader doesn't always know the exact details of what causes what in a scene, and sometimes not even the writer knows. But it's telling us a story that distracts us from the clichés we're using, and that's what we are trying to do here.

All of this shows us what her reaction is, by having us read about it as it's happening - without having to be told like this:

Sophia stopped. Her legs were weak with fear, and she fell back as she tried to move away from the knife.

In conclusion

The point of Show Don't Tell is to know what's really going on in your scene, and then describe what we would experience if we were there (the exact boundaries being determined by Point of View). You don't have to tell the reader something if they can make the connection themselves.

Writing isn't really about showing what character's feel. It's about making the reader feel.

You could even have a cold-hearted unfeeling robot (Terminator?), as long as that character makes your audience have the emotions you want them to have, you're doing it right.

I'd suggest reading books, watching movies, TV-shows, and when you feel something, try to figure out what they did to make you feel that. Take notes if you need to...

I'm an Aspie myself and I've come to realize, as an Aspie, you have to make social interaction and human emotions into a science. Observe and try to figure things out. Create theories and see if they work.

Yes, it takes longer. Yes, it's harder. In the end, though, you'll probably have a better knowledge of how it works intellectually, as opposed to everyone else that just go by their gut feelings.

Studying the subject of making people feel you will realize that yes, in fact, one way to do it is to show what your characters, and your POV-person feels.

I personally found that one great step in the right direction was to read Margie Lawson's Empowering Character Emotions. But she also has several other lecture packages that might be of interest. I've only read the one so far, but I plan to read more in the future.

One other thing you'll likely come across is that you should be cautious about copying another author verbatim. That's how you risk falling into the cliché-trap.

Masters of writing watch what others do, observe character emotions and then come up with a fresh, new way to write it.

Done right, you'll not only give your readers the emotion you're aiming for but also elation at your fresh, new way of doing it.

When it comes to mastering all these levels of writing and writing for emotions, you could even argue Asperger is an advantage to writers.

My theory is that writers have to deconstruct human behavior before being able to construct it again in their characters. Depending on that deconstruction in our daily lives at least gives us the incentive to push on when others might give up...

And, being an Aspie also forces us to be intellectual and aware of so many things, chances are we'll see things other people, on autopilot, don't notice. And that, in turn, will give us great, important topics to write about. It may even drive us to action that reverberates around the world!

"Show don't tell" is a general rule which basically means: immerse your readers in your story. It's not meant literally (as others have pointed out) and it doesn't just apply to body language.

For example, don't state someone's personality then go into ordinary action and dialogue. Instead, have the character express that personality. If someone is kind to other adults but a strict jerk with his kids, don't tell us that, show it over the course of several scenes. In this case, "show don't tell" means to show us the character polite and thoughtful with his neighbor and coworker but yelling at his son and unfair to his daughter.

We all belong to multiple subcultures where words and actions have different meanings. Your gender, sexual orientation, generation, social class, race, country, and so forth are all important factors and will change how you describe a scene. Your disability is also a subculture. Your disability and my disability will be completely different from each other, though there is also a more general disability subculture.

Autism (whether Asperger's or elsewhere on the spectrum) most definitely gives you a different view of the world. And there's a strong community of people in the US and many other countries who identify proudly as autistic and work to create culture and community.

It's certainly very useful to learn how neurotypical people see the world. Not just for your own sake, but as a writer. You do need to know how an NT writer would approach a scene or a character. But this isn't your culture and you don't need to write as if you were something you're not. Just like black writers need to understand the white world to a degree but they certainly don't have to write like white people.

Autistic people have emotions just like neurotypical people do, but your communication of them is different. How would you describe someone being angry to a friend in a letter? Or if you're telling a story to a group of people? (The story can be funny, heartbreaking, silly, serious, etc, and you can imagine how you'd tell different types of stories here.)

You wouldn't just say "he was angry." But you also wouldn't say "he shook his fist at me" because that's not what would have tipped you off, right? How did you know he was angry? Show that. Now do the same thing telling a story about someone who was sad. Or frustrated. How you show this has to come from your own being. Your voice.

It's also not just about emotions. Think of your characters and what is most important to them. What don't they care about? What do they want? What are their goals? Now show them.

You say other's emotions are clear to you when people are giving verbal hints about them - when they're saying "this is fascinating" etc. This is one tool you could use in your writing.

You can hint at emotions through the way a character talks. Commas and repetitions stress what is important; a character whose speech is more abrupt than usual, perhaps skipping "unnecessary" words, is under some sort of tension (whether positive or negative), etc.

You can imply emotions. For example:

"blah blah blah" Adam swallowed; soldiers didn't cry. "blah blah blah"

By the statement "soldiers don't cry" I have implied that Adam is struggling not to burst into tears, for whatever reason. Whatever he's telling, it's sad. This is implied by the fact that he has to tell himself not to cry.

For your POV character, especially if you're writing in first person, you can also sometimes explicitly state the emotion. "That made me angry" is much more natural than "that made me clench my fists". In fact, a character who is in control of himself might be boiling inside while showing very little outward signs of it.

If your self-reflection skills are good, you can try observing yourself when you are surprised, angry, etc. In conversation with others, you're busy doing other things than self-observing, but when you're on your own and something you read, or something on TV elicits a strong emotion in you, you can take a moment to note your own non-verbal cues. As an example, reading a tense passage in a book, I might be biting my knuckles; or pacing nervously around the room, book in hand. If I'm watching something exciting, I will be leaning towards the screen, eyes wide. Etc.

I'm an Aspie, and I'm a writer, too. Let me tell you how I did it in one case:

A young child (in Thailand) is following Uncle Kiet, and tells him "I want to be a mahout (elephant wrangler) when I grow up". Uncle Kiet says "that's not for girls". Therefore, I have shown, not told, readers that the young child is a girl, because rather than being told, you come to the conclusion, indirectly, that the child is a girl because of what the uncle said.

Another example (same story) is when she criticizes the Christian missionaries because "we're good Buddhists" (shows her religion) and they "cannot get the year right because they say it's {year, Christian calendar}" (shows the time frame and is dismissive of Christianity) "and {year, Buddhist calendar} is the year" (the awkward syntax shows she's a little girl).

So I would say put some information out there and let the reader conclude what you are not saying.