From Writing to Writer, by Donna Williams

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From Writing to Writer

by Donna Williams

In school, I was a good reader but when I was nine they found out that I actually couldn’t understand sentences.

I could understand individual words but understanding written sentences was as hard as understanding heard ones.

They just ended up in a meaningless tumble.

Hard to imagine that from there I have become a writer with 9 published books, 4 film scripts and a (as yet unpublished) novel, Diamonds in The Mud.

When I was actually able to stay sitting in a seat (and mood, anxiety, compulsive and information processing disorders make that quite some challenge) I was able to copy sentences from the blackboard and hence learned to handwrite. But expressing myself personally was something altogether different. Intimacy-phobic, my life was committed to intense privacy so where on earth was I meant to find the desire to show others who was in there? But I still loved the world and people and life and I was an avid people watcher all my life, mapping their patterns, their ‘music of beingness’, like a master spy, a ‘fly on the wall’ and not even I noticed I was noticing. 

My writing career began when a typewriter was left in my room at the age of nine. Like most introduced objects, these things were not presented to me with instruction for it was known that in my mostly meaning deaf world, that was a sure fire way to put your own stamp upon it, branding the object part of your world and an attempt to invade mine. So the typewriter, like other introductions, appeared to have introduced itself, it was merely there one day.

It took me some time to dare to touch its keys, watching the mechanism as it struck the ribbon through the roller (for there was no paper in it) and the carriage moved along, now shockingly altered by me. I had had an impact upon it. I existed. I had to undo it and pushed the carriage back into line before the hyperventilation subsided.

Progressively, I dared this all again until one day, I arrived home to find the typewriter had fed itself with a sheet of paper. I was shocked. The typewriter and I were not on speaking terms for quite some time. Then I dared to press the keys again.

To my horror, it printed upon the page. Now not only had I made an impact, but it could not be erased. There was the proof, upon the white of the page. There was no denying it now. I had asserted my existence and it had been captured. Then I broke out, defying all compulsion to rip the paper out, shred it and eat it, and typed a whole line of letter patterns. Well, that was the beginning of the end. Before I knew it the patterns of letters had me in fits of giggles and they made their way line by line down the page. Over the next four years the letter patterns would become word lists and the word lists would eventually become automatic, subconscious-driven, poetry hidden in the roof void where it was allowed to dare exist. My career as a writer had begun.

I went on to consolidate these words into the songs on my CDs, titled Nobody Nowhere and Mutation and expand on the experiences within them in the autobiographical works, Nobody Nowhere, Somebody Somewhere, Like Color To The Blind and Everyday Heaven, into text books, Autism: An Inside Out Approach, Autism and Sensing: The Unlost Instinct, Exposure Anxiety: The Invisible Cage of Involuntary Self Protection Responses and The Jumbled Jigsaw and the poetry work, Not Just Anything. Sometimes, you have just got to trust and open the floodgates.

So my books had their foundations long before words ever found their way onto paper. The experiences under the words were first etched upon my soul, beyond the grasp of my conscious mind. Writing was the first key to the door behind which it was all locked. 

Welcome, do come through. 

Donna Williams *)

Donna Williams was born in Australia in 1963 and grew up in the inner city with more labels than a jam jar: deaf, psychotic, disturbed, autistic. Donna grew up with “dysfunctional language” and came to understand sentences around the age of nine. Unlike those who “think in pictures,” Donna describes herself as a kinaesthetic thinker for whom movement, pattern, theme and feel give definition to her world. 
As well as being an artist, sculptor, composer and screenwriter, she is also an internationally best-selling author with 9 published books in the field of Autism including four text books, a renowned international public speaker, a qualified teacher, and has worked as an autism consultant for 8 years working with over 600 people on the autistic spectrum.

Her first of four autobiographical works, Nobody Nowhere, spent 10 weeks at number one on the New York Times Bestseller List, sold over half a million copies worldwide and has been published in over 20 languages. Her second book, Somebody Somewhere (the second of four books in her autobiographical series) also became an international number one bestseller. Her life story is currently under option by a Hollywood film company.

She has been the subject of three documentaries, appeared as Person Of The Week with the late Peter Jennings on ABC, been featured on The Connie Chung Show, and was known for a number of interviews on Peter Gzowski’s CBC “Morningside” program.

After 13 years living in the UK, she now lives back in Australia with her husband, Chris Samuel, where they established the world’s first international self employment service for people on the autistic spectrum atwww.auties.org.

Donna can be found all over the web, but www.donnawilliams.net is a pretty good place to start.

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