My weird: Aromantic & Asexual
How does being aro/ace affect my writing?
What is it like not experiencing sexual attraction? Simple; imagine someone you experience no sexual attraction to. They’re not repulsive or anything, they might even be aesthetically pleasing, but they are 100% not your type.
Now imagine everyone is like that, because you don’t have a type.
Now imagine not having a type and trying to simply exist in a world where people won’t shut up about having a type.
I find narratives which contain sex fall between baffling and gross. Why would I want to hear about a character’s bodily fluids in this much detail?? Do we really need to go into the nitty gritty of what their various organs are doing in response to a situation?
Imagine an author who feels the need to graphically describe their character defecating and centres the entire plot around this concept, and you have an idea of how weird a lot of fiction looks to me.
Not experiencing romantic attraction is similar, except that while most allosexuals cannot coherently explain sexual attraction no alloromantic seems capable of explaining romantic attraction. But that doesn’t stop them thinking it should feature in every narrative no matter how much shoehorning is required.
So, in my writing I avoid any graphic sexual elements and romance gets handled like friendship (it exists to flesh out the character and gets brought up only so much as it adds to the plot). Sure, people fall in love, but they also… don’t. In fact most of the time they don’t. And that’s fine.