question about aspergers

[cheeryface]

if you have a child with aspergers are they unable to write a made up story ?
have they never been able to do it or can they lose the ability to do it ?

ds11 (possible aspergers) cannot write a story. He can copy someone elses idea or facts from a book or tv show but cannot write a simple story it seems.
If he is asked to re write something in his own words he cant do that either.

i have discovered this since working at home with him. he is being educated at home until he is transferred to another school as the last one left him deeply upset and in a mess.

I wouldn't say 'unable' but ds does find it incredibly difficult. It's frustrating because there have been times when he's written incredibly imaginative and complex stories but ONLY when he's been able to come up with a topic that interests and motivates him, and that's rare indeed. At one point he entered a national competition and was in the 'mentioned' entries, but his attempts are rare.

I'm trying to find an English tutor to work on creative writing, essays etc atm (he's home educated) but there are so few around .

Same with rewriting in own words, rephrasing etc. I think he looks at it and thinks 'what's the point, it already makes sense as it is' so won't make the attempt.

Can your boy write about himself? Ds finds that very hard too. The crunch when he came out of school was over a piece of work that involved writing a brief autobiography and he went completely to bits over it.

I think part of it is the right/wrong element of academic work. There is a definite answer to Maths, Science, History etc but when it comes to creative writing it's more open to individual expression and there is no right or wrong. I think that throws ds and confuses him, so he bottles out and won't even try.

Same as streaky.

thanks for that. he is at the minute very annoyed and lay face down on his bed. i have just read a book to him about forest fires and then asked him to write a short story about experiencing a forest fire.
He is mad , saying he has no imagination and hes a loser....here we go again

My ds is 6 and writes stories - it just that characters such as dog are called dog or girls and boys are not given names just girl or boy. They also involve his interests so characters can teleport and die and come back to life as in computer games.
However if you ask him in a comprehension what would happen next quite often the answer would be nothing because they are not real.....

i said 'imagine you had gone to live in Australia' and he said 'how?, ive never been to Australia'

how am i supposed to know is another favourite answer.
The sad thing is he really wants to go to the new school and make a fresh start. he wants to impress them. I think hes going to struggle again.

Ds15 has moderate autism and had never been able to write a story until the last year. He is currently writing a graphic novel(not been allowed to look yet) which, according to his TA who is illustrating it for him, is exceptionally good and the unit are looking to get it published.
Dd7 writes no end of stories and has done for years. I don't see any difference between the stories she writes to the ones her NT sister did tbh (well spelling and puntcuation is far superior in my dd who has ASD's case )

so maybe its not really an indicator of aspergers then ?

Don't know every child is different my dd was asked to imagine what a Badger would say if they were making a speech - she didn't know what a Badger would say as she is not a Badger...

DS 8 (AS) will write stories about Dr. Who or Star Wars (or using their characters) but other than that no. It leads to lots of tears and panic attacks in school whenever creative writing comes up as he is banned from the above topics there.
Interesting the stuff PPs have said about writing stuff in his own words. We are working very hard on that at the moment as he has to do a project on the Tudors, one of his previous special interests. He wants to just copy and paste stuff and it is causing big battles when I won't let him. Although I have said to him, but you won't write using words like that, what words would you use, and he puts even longer ones than the website used not sure his teacher will believe it is his own work .

it's quite common, though to be fair a lot of children struggle to write about things they don't know - even if they think they can, lol

he'll need more scaffolding than just reading something and then writing about it, if you're not the sort of person that creative writing comes naturally to (and a lot of people aren't AS or not) it's very hard to just write off the top of your head

if you want to use that as a starter, then go over what it's like, get him to look for things that he'd be able to see, smell, how things would feel (physically) - that gives you description

look at the events that you've read about - what would he have done differently? What would scare him? Was anything exciting? - that can be turned into a plot

get him to take notes when you're discussing it - then he can expand it into a story

Putting things in your own words is a different skill to creative writing, is that comprehension or vocabulary that's causing him problems?

My DS (aged 7, no dx but lots of aspergers indicators) is having similar problems. He is so articulate verbally it makes it all the more painful. Anything where he has to put stuff in his own words is a big challenge. I'm going to try showing him a thesaurus to help him get away from the right/wrong thing Streaky mentions. Incidentally, he has trouble with drawing for the same reasons. he had to draw some characters from a book recently and we ended up tracing them...

Maryz .. The amount of times we have said that about ds.. .

I have aspergers and I have always loved writing stories. However, one thing that I can not do is to do indepth character analysis or development. My stories are all focused upon the plot.
Ds1 has started to write stories, but he takes passages from his favourite stories and adapts them slightly. This is taken from one he wrote a couple of weeks ago:

"Here's Edwood squirril coming downstares down down down down down down down. Sometimes he wishes that he cood stop going stares and think for a momonte. Timmy only knows the way of comeing downstares if his name wasen't Edwood Squirril. His name is Dennis the squrril"

......

"Timmy" said Dennis "Yes?"
"I think the bees have serspect something."
"What have they serspect?"
"The most important bee is the queen bee."
"Timmy"
"Yes?"
"Have you got your umbrelar and walk up and down with it."

"Tim -ow -my"
"Yes?"
Have you got your gun?"
"Yes"
"If you soot the balloon I will have to let go of the string and that will spoil me and I will float down."
"Bow"
"Did I miss?"
"You didn't but you missed the balloon"

Ahh bullet thats lovely! Come to think of it I remember 'writing' 101 Dalmations when I was small... How old is your ds? And should we keep on at our dss to try or is it a waste of time and effort? I think my ds would enjoy writing factual stuff like maryz's, and seeing as writing per se is not his strong point, surely anything which helps him to actually do some writing must be a good thing.

He's 7 and a half, which is about the age that I started to get into writing creatively. From probably about 8, maybe a little younger, almost all (and when I say almost I mean only one or two weren't) have focused on my obsession with historical or fictional violent death in varying forms. Luckily none of my teachers tried to dissuade me as I think I would struggle to write a story that didn't look into those themes.
Factual stuff is good, absolutely nothing wrong with it. Perhaps you could also try asking your ds to write an account of something that did happen, but write it as though it was a story, using descriptive language etc.

Ds did a series of creative writing workshops a couple of years ago and it really helped him develop a skill. The theme was 'World Building' and the facilitator got the children to find pictures, textures, smells and anything else that they felt could have a place in the world they were creating. That visual/sensory stimulus was great for ds because he had something solid to build his story around. He did a very good piece of work and I thought he'd cracked it, but after a couple more attempts he just gave up and hasn't written creatively for over a year now .

Planning is hard for ds as well. I really like tabulahrasa's idea of note-taking during discussion as it seems an obvious way of doing things to me, but it makes no sense to ds (we've tried it, many times - he just gets anxious and upset ). Tbh I think it's part of his ADHD (dual dx) in that he struggles with executive function and putting thoughts in order. When he does write it's a spontaneous thing, planning confuses him. That's why I get him to write longer pieces of work at the computer, then he can go back and edit if it's not how he wants it to be. It helps at this stage but it's not ideal.

cheeryface if it is any comfort Shakespeare used to nick most of his plots and rather dodgy they are in places too

In different genres there do tend to be the same basic plots and types of characters and the stories are variations on a theme - if you have time maybe you could break the elements down and look at them with him so he has a kind of "template" for writing to a formula (works for some of our most successful writers...) Teach him the cliches then it will make it easier to add his own original bits as it is not so overwhelming.

There is a site on ebay called extraspecialfriends or something like that and they do a "what happened next" storyboard resource with velcro pictograms and wipe-clean board.

streakybacon - some people just don't get on with planning at all

the notetaking, you still have to structure it btw, so if he comes up with a good idea, you tell him to write that down - in fact yyou still have to do that with classes of 16 year olds about to sit exams lol

ficklefeckle is right, you teach the structure of everything and get them to use the conventions used in what you've been reading and do a variation on that, or what happened afterwards, or what happened before, or what happened from another character's point of view

or take a different type of writing and do something with that, write a poem about a story, a short story about a factual piece of writing and so on

hmm, lost half my post there, lol

remember that at 11 anything being taught about creative writing is still really structured and supported as they don't know the skills yet, they have the basics, but not everything and it's really common for any child to sit blankly when they're supposed to be writing, so you usually give them a starting point

Dd1 loves writing stories (she has her own story writing book) but her stories are very realistic (only things that could actually happen in real life).

At ds's unit they use various strategies to help. That includes ds being provided with pictures of possible scenes and characters and being supported in mapping out a plot.