I read this when I was ten. I felt sorry for the monster. There's a long description of mountains, I skipped it and imagined one I'd seen on telly. It doesn't matter what Mary saw. End of lesson.

Get a structure. A story is made out of stories. You must arrange them into a pattern you can change without breaking it. Here's a book about making models. It's more or less the same.

Boy, that was heavy. Let's go visit Alice. She's sure things ought to have a meaning and knows when things sound wrong. She knows every fallacy. Listen carefully. It all makes no sense.

Find one thing that's true. This book for teachers of the severely autistic is about wordless language. Mostly language is a far more complex social interaction where words don't really matter.

Now write a novel. It's easy. All you have to do is rearrange some or all of the little bits that make up Don Quixote. That's what everyone else does.