A few tips on writing believable disabled characters.

So if you read my rant on the portrayal of disabled characters in middle grade fiction last week, you may have been left with the impression that it was safest not to write a disabled character at all. Sorry about that! Of course you should write MG characters with real believable disabilities who kick A and take names. We need more of those!

I realize that some of the tropes I described last week come, originally, from a place of compassion. An author thinks about the disability that s/he's given the character. And maybe as soon as s/he thinks about it, s/he wants to solve the problem for the character. And the easiest ways to do that are to deliver a miracle cure (trope #4) or a superpower (trope #5) or to pretend that the disability doesn't really matter (trope #6).

But a writer's job is to dig deeper.

Acknowledge that the disability is part of your character's life, probably a permanent part, and that it presents challenges which the character lives with every day. Show us that the character's life is good and meaningful.

Here are a few ideas.

Ask yourself how the character's disability affects the story

If your disabled character is the protagonist, what is different for him/her because of the disability? How does it change the challenges s/he faces? How does it change the ways s/he deals with the challenges? If the disability were removed, would the story change at all? (If the answer is "no", consider scrapping the disability.... or working on it some more.)

If the disabled character is not the protagonist, make sure s/he has a story arc of his/her own. S/he shouldn't be there just to teach the protagonist compassion, or to make the protagonist feel grateful not to be disabled.

Remember the "able" in "disabled"

What can your character do? What's s/he good at? The character needs the same complexities as a non-disabled character-- flaws, good qualities, the works. Hopes, dreams, things that annoy the hell out of her. And like the rest of us, s/he should have a special talent or two... one not related to the disability, please. She might be ace at manipulating a wheelchair in tight spaces, but consider making her ace at factoring quadrinomials as well. Or make him a train buff with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the US freight-rail system which proves useful when push comes to shove. Whatever suits the story.

Research your character's disability

The external manifestation of a character's disability usually occurs to us fairly quickly. The character has a visual or hearing impairment, or wears a leg brace, or has one arm, or uses a wheelchair. But what caused the disability? A genetic syndrome, a disease, an accident?

Is the disability you've given the character one that actually exists? (It's surprising how often this comes up!)

What are the less-visible aspects of the genetic syndrome, disease, accident, etc? What treatment was required, is required now, will be required? Is this going to get better in the future? Or worse?

When you're researching the disability, you may discover things that you wish weren't true. Resist the urge to change the facts. You don't have to use all the facts in your story... but don't rewrite science.

Once you've done your research, of course, you should treat it like any other research you do for fiction, ie apply it with a very light touch. After all, if your readers wanted to read a treatise on osteogenesis imperfecta (or the Battle of Agincourt, or gemstone cutting) they'd go do the same research you did. Remember, the story is king.

Research is a vassal.

Try it yourself

Avoid the common authorly tendency to have characters scale Mount Everest in a wheelchair. (That's only a slight exaggeration.) To give yourself a sense of what your character will and won't be doing, try it yourself. When an author has experimented with wearing a blindfold or earplugs, or using crutches or a wheelchair, or avoiding using his/her hands, the details come through much more clearly and realistically in the book.

Experiment with due regard for your own safety and that of others! Don't walk around upstairs with your eyes closed, or try to cross streets in a wheelchair if you're not a skilled operator of same.

When you use this experience in your writing, be sure to think about whether your character's disability is new or old. If new, the character is likely to have the same difficulties and reactions that you had. But if it's old, the character will be used to some things and may not give them much thought. S/he may be skilled at tasks you found difficult (like carrying a cup of hot tea while on crutches) but stymied by others (like taking said cup of hot tea up a spiral staircase).

Consider the Mechanics

Humans make many things, and the things humans make are generally imperfect. Leg braces chafe, break and malfunction. They also weigh several pounds. Prostheses can cause sores and ulcers. Wheelchairs are as subject to breakdowns and damage as are other conveyances.

Figure out which aids your character uses, and research them. Make sure you consider the aid in the context of your story's setting. Will your character move easily on a ship, a sandy beach, a steep cliff, an icy lake? If your setting is historic, what aids would your character have used during your novel's time period?

Sensitive Language

Whether you're writing a disabled character or not, be aware of words and terms that are outdated and/or offensive. Such words and terms should be avoided in the authorial voice. If they're used in dialogue, they should be dealt with as an issue.

These include:

- cripple, crippled, and crippling (including figurative use, eg "A crippling blow" or "The crippled ship limped into port")

- retard, retarded (including figurative use, eg "A retarded idea")

- former medical terms that have become insults, eg mongoloid and spastic (also avoid "spaz")

- slang nicknames, eg "Pegleg"

- Disabilities used in a figurative sense. ("What a lame excuse," "He's blind to her faults." )

- "confined to a wheelchair" (a wheelchair is not a cell)

Consider the social aspects of the disability

Your character's interactions with others will be affected by the disability. The ways in which people-- children and adults-- react to disabilities are myriad, many-faceted, and bizarre. You may have seen and experienced this in your own life. If not, watch for it.

I started out to write a long list of examples here, but I've gone on long enough, and it will be more useful to you as a writer to make your own observations.

(In R.J. Palacio's Wonder, the social aspects of the protagonist's disability are the main focus of the novel. And kids love it.)

Anyway. I hope the above will prove useful to writers who want to write stories with well-rounded, multi-faceted characters with disabilities. Please do! We need more of them.

What's this disabled character doing in this MG novel? Probably about what they were doing in 1910.

Hello. I want to share a few thoughts about the portrayal of characters with disabilities in middle grade novels. There's the good:

• Mary in the Little House books. While there's usually little for diversity advocates to cheer about in this series, Mary's blindness is very matter-of-fact and realistic. It affects her life and her family's lives. And it doesn't ruin them.
• Wonder by RJ Palacio. What can I say that hasn't been said already?
• Handbook for Dragon Slayers by Merrie Haskell. A MG fantasy – yes, a fantasy!-- in which a protagonist with a disability goes on a journey of discovery without encountering a miracle cure.

And then there's the not-so-good. Below are six tropes that encompass many of the portrayals of disabled characters in MG fiction. Each of them can be found in recent work as well as older books, though I'm only going to name older books.

I've given each trope a cute name even though they're not really very cute.

1. Paging Dr. Strangelove

In these books, the disabled character is a villain. His/her mind is as twisted as his/her body, get it? In case you don't, sometimes it's spelled out. Blech. In one MG book I read, there was an attempt to soften this (I think?) by having the villain turn out to be faking his disability. The image remains.

A venerable example of disability-conflated-with-badness is The Secret Garden (1910). When Mary arrives from India, she's sickly and unlikable. As she becomes more physically able, she turns into a better person. Then she arranges the same transformation for her bedridden cousin Colin. The message is clear.

2. God Bless Us, Every One

Like Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol, the disabled character in some MG books is only there to gauge the protagonist's moral growth.

3. Exit Little Eva

In the 19^th century, one of the primary tasks of children in books was to die, preferably after a long illness and some edifying moral reflections. Although a few of these kids' books are still in print, like The Birds' Christmas Carol (1887), this one has mostly, er, died out.

Zombie-like, though, this trope rises again in the form of the character-too-badly-injured-to-survive. He tends to show up in action, pursuit, and battle scenes. He gets one injury, and then another, and things proceed to the point where he would be disabled were he to survive. So instead he's provided with yet another injury that enables him to die heroically. Sigh. As soon as the disabling injury was delivered, you knew this character was toast.

4. It's A Miracle!

The protagonist has a disability, but it's cured by the end of the book, often as a reward for something the protagonist has accomplished. While this is essentially what happens in The Secret Garden, and appears in rather bizarre form at the end of Johnny Tremain, it's also very common in fantasy novels.

5. He's Blind, But He Sees So Much More Than We Do
In these books, the character's disability is an undisguised blessing. It gives him/her powers that the abled characters can only dream of. If the protagonist in one of these books had a brain injury, it would be more likely to result in telepathy than in seizures.

This sort of book is satirized in the play Butterflies Are Free as "Little Donny Dark". In the Little Donny Dark books written by the protagonist's mother, the blind boy has no trouble flying a plane, because his other senses are so highly developed.

6. You'll Find My Disability on Page 16

These are books in which the protagonist has a disability which does not affect his/her life in any way. It might be a disability that, in real life, would take some serious managing (new skills to learn, trips to specialists, hospital stays, etc). The book, however, will mention the disability only once. Neither the protagonist nor the reader ever has to think about it again.
 

Oh dear. I hope my rant hasn't scared writers off from including disabled characters in their MG novels. Because we need more, not fewer. We need fully developed, complex characters whose disability is one aspect of their lives, one that matters but doesn't mean there's less for us to know and find out about the character. In a future post, I'll talk about some approaches for writers.

Middle Grade: Time to Lose the C-word

In the past two months, I've been blasted out of five (5) recent children's books by the C-word.

There I was, reading along, having a grand time, when all of a sudden...BAM. C-word. I'm knocked out of the story and cast adrift, the words on the page sifting meaninglessly past a brain now completely preoccupied with wondering why the author –with whom I'd been getting along swimmingly up till then-- suddenly decided to descend into hate speech.

But don't picture me reading these books. Picture a child in a wheelchair. A little boy with a leg-brace. A girl on crutches. Picture them reading the books. All of a sudden they're smacked right in the eyes with a line something like this:

He was a cripple.

I hadn't known she was crippled.

Why would anyone hurt a cripple?

Why indeed? But the child reader has been called this name on the school playground. And yes, of course it hurt.

(By the way, the above-- and below-- are not direct quotes from the books. I'm not naming and shaming. Just hoping for change.)

Does it matter how the word is presented? Whether it's in quotes or not? Marginally. Only marginally. Remember, the target readers are children, with a child's level of discernment.

Anyway, in four of the five books, the word occurred at least once without quotes.

In two of them, it was used in the authorial voice to describe a person with a physical disability.

In two, it was used to describe hypothetical people, "cripples" in the abstract.

In three, it was used as a figure of speech.

A crippling blow.

The ship was crippled.

(If you're thinking that adds up to seven: Yeah. Three of the five books used the word repeatedly.)

I think most people would probably be okay with the figurative use. I'm not. For those people to whom a word has fangs, it has fangs even when it's used figuratively. If you think about other hate speech in this context, you'll see what I mean.

It would also probably be okay with most people (including me) if the word was discussed, if the fact that it's hateful and hurtful, and/or how a character is affected by the word, was the author's point.

It's never discussed.

We didn't use the C-word for years, because we understood that it was insulting and hateful. Now apparently we think it's edgy.

The C-word, by the way, does not have fangs for all people with mobility-related disabilities. Those who react most negatively to it, I think, are those who were already physically disabled in elementary school.

But these are middle grade books. They're for people in elementary school.

So please, can we stop calling them names?





 
update 8/12/14: Two days later...now I've read the word in six (6) recent middle grade books.