#WeNeedDiverseBooks is a hashtag that sprang to prominence a
couple of months ago after a bunch of authors noticed the flagship author panel
for a major book industry conference was rather monotonously white. It picked
up a lot of attention, from both authors and readers, who pointed out that our
world isn't just white, it's a rainbow of people of colour, and people who are
LGBT, and disabled people. Yet open any random book from your bookshelves, and
there's probably a greater than 95% chance that the protagonist and the hero
(whether one and the same or separate people) are white, straight and
emphatically non-disabled. If there is a character from a diverse background,
then they're usually the faithful sidekick - Tonto to the hero's Lone Ranger.
There are the odd best-sellers which feature diverse
characters as the lead, for instance James Patterson's Alex Cross series, or
Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan novels, but they are few and far
between. In general books that openly feature diverse characters in lead roles
seem to end up relegated to the mid-list (the books expected by their
publishers to do okay, but nothing more). One interesting (and disturbing)
facet of #WeNeedDiverseBooks was several authors mentioning that they had been
sneaking diverse characters through the publishers by never actually specifying
they were Latina, or African American, or gay, but dropping the odd hint that
the careful reader would pick up. An industry where you need to hide the
ethnicity or sexual orientation of your characters to optimise your chances of
being published is clearly one with problems that need addressing. And that
needs not just the publishers to set their editorial and marketing houses in
order, but also writers to produce books with diverse characters.
As a disabled person and writer, #WeNeedDiverseBooks struck
a chord. When it comes to writing I'm in the fairly serious amateur category;
one novel completed years ago, another that's sitting at the 70% stage, and a
bunch of shorter fiction, one of which sold professionally (but never actually
appeared). Disability features in most of my fiction to greater or lesser
extent, there's a wheelchair-using major character in the completed novel
(though she's an oddity in being mobility impaired, but not technically
disabled), while the work-in-progress novel is one-third narrated by a
wheelchair-user (point of view rotates among the leads) and another of the
leads is almost certainly neurodiverse. While I am mobility-impaired (and neurodiverse), I'm not a wheelchair user, I've used crutches for the past
couple of decades, and I've always had a desire at the back of my mind to
create a protagonist who uses crutches, so the rest of this article takes the
process of creating that character as a basis for a discussion of how to create
a convincing disabled character and factors that may need to be considered in writing about them.
Origin Stories: Character or Plot Driven?
Deliberately creating a disabled (or otherwise diverse)
character is different from the normal character creation process, we're
settling on one physical or mental facet of the character and building inwards from
there, rather than letting the character form around their actual character as
a person and building outwards towards their physical nature, and different
again from having character be driven by the needs of the plot. That difference
is simply a reflection of having disability/diversity as the principle driver,
the internal characterisation and the external plot factors are still there,
they're just playing second fiddle for once.
Just like a superhero, every disabled character needs an
origin story. While a superhero's origin story tells you how they gained their
powers, a disabled character's origin story tells you what their disability is,
and how it came about. Disability etiquette holds that you shouldn't grill
someone on the details of their disability and how they became disabled, but
for disabled fictional characters, such niceties may not be possible, and this
brings us to the first question: is the plot character-driven, or is the
character plot-driven. To illustrate this, if the plot requires that a
wheelchair-using disabled character
stands up at some point (most wheelchair-users can stand to some degree), then,
just like Chekhov's gun, I need to establish that they can, and ensure that
their disability is compatible with that need, before they ever need to take
advantage of that (this was precisely the situation I needed in one of my short
stories, the protagonist had to brain the villain at the climax - served him
right for assuming a wheelchair user was helpless). On the other hand, if the
story is character-driven, then the actions they undertake within the plot need
to be compatible with their disability. Generally I prefer the second style of
character creation, because that's pretty much how we experience life as
disabled people. I can't magically change my disability to suit whatever access
issue is currently causing a problem.
Edited to add: I think I need to expand a bit on the need for an origin story: as the author, you need to develop the disabled character's origin story, because so much of their background and characterisation will evolve from it. But whether the reader needs to know that origin story is a separate issue. It's entirely possible to write a book with a disabled protagonist and never to get into the origin story in the published text, or it may be so integral to the character that the plot revolves around its ramifications (c.f. Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan, whose disability results from and is intimately tied to his family's political position), making it absolutely essential that it is discussed in detail.
Edited to add: I think I need to expand a bit on the need for an origin story: as the author, you need to develop the disabled character's origin story, because so much of their background and characterisation will evolve from it. But whether the reader needs to know that origin story is a separate issue. It's entirely possible to write a book with a disabled protagonist and never to get into the origin story in the published text, or it may be so integral to the character that the plot revolves around its ramifications (c.f. Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan, whose disability results from and is intimately tied to his family's political position), making it absolutely essential that it is discussed in detail.
Born? Or Acquired?
The next question to answer is when did the character become
disabled, because that goes a long way towards defining the character's lived
experience. Many disabled people are born with congenital or neonatal
disabilities, so there may be issues of growing up disabled to address. How did
the family react? How bad was the school system? Were they bullied over their
disability? And so on. For acquired disability, the character may have had to
deal with significant physical and/or mental trauma, they may have had to revise
their career goals, their family life may have been fundamentally changed. I
fall in the less well known middle ground, with congenital disabilities that
were there from birth, but which no one actually identified, or in some cases
noticed, until I was an adult and they worsened to the point they couldn't be
ignored, so it's not simply a binary choice, many people will have experienced
a progression in their disability, not simply a sudden acquisition.
That middle ground also helps illustrate that the experience
of disability isn't divided into two separate poles, it's actually a spectrum
of reactions. The clichéd afternoon movie holds that someone who acquires
disability is going to go through a significant grieving process, if not become
notably bitter, then fight their way back to full fitness (yeah, right);
whereas someone born disabled will serenely accept everything that comes their
way. But those are simply two potential reactions of many, my own reaction to
suddenly acquiring significant disability was more in the 'okay, this is weird,
and sort of technically interesting (I'm an engineer), and £$)@ing painful!'
range. Most of my disabled friends, whatever their origin, fall into the 'I'm
disabled, get over it' camp. Reactions vary, and to healthily reflect the
diversity of disability, so should the portrayal of how people react to their
disability.
You Pays Your Money and Takes Your Choice
With those two questions settled, we need to settle on an
actual disability. It can be something that the plot mandates, it can be
something that interests you for personal reasons, that fits other elements of
characterisation, or it can simply be something that seems like an interesting
challenge to write around. And there can be wider factors at work, you may want
to educate people about disability, whether in general or for a specific
disability, you can want to make political points around the way society reacts
to disability. They're all valid reasons that can influence the disability you
pick for the story you want to tell.
A Crutch to Lean On
Turning to my own character creation process, I've wanted to
create a character who uses crutches for a long time, because, as
#WeNeedDiverseBooks picked up on, we would all like to see characters who
reflect our own personal minority, and using crutches both comes with
interesting mobility complications, I never have a hand free when I'm moving
around, and falls in an interesting middle ground between walkies and wheelies
that is rarely explored. Outside of Long John Silver and an Arthur C Clarke
juvenile I can't think of any novels with a protagonist who uses crutches, and
I'm frustrated by the societal meme that says relying on a crutch is a negative
- not for anyone who actually needs one it isn't!
Giving a character my own personal mix of disabilities
wasn't going to work, it's too complex and ill-defined for a good story, so I
needed to pick another disability, which meant considering reasons people end
up as long-term crutch-users. For many
people, crutches are a step in a transition between able-bodied and
wheelchair-user, but I decided that for reasons of potential long term
character development, plus the whole specifically wanting a crutch-user thing,
that I didn't want a progressive disability. This largely ruled out
neurological disorders such as MS, plus joint-related disabilities like
rheumatoid arthritis. I also ruled out spinal injuries for
political/educational reasons; society is stuck on the idea of walking as the
one valid goal for a person with a spinal injury, while the reality is that a
chair is almost inevitably more efficient and liberating for a para, so the
last thing I want to do is reinforce the 'walking good, wheeling bad'
meme; and of course I already have a para character in my work in progress.
Around about last autumn I started seriously looking at the idea of an amputee
character. For her (for various reasons my protagonists are usually female) to
be a primarily crutch-using amputee I'd need to complicate the situation,
because most amputees get by with prosthetics, but I've read enough orthopaedic
stuff over the years, in the course of researching my own situation, to know
that very high amputees - hip-level and through the pelvis - often find
prosthetics of limited utility, meaning some either use crutches near
exclusively, or switch between crutches, prosthetic and wheelchair according to
the task at hand, which could work for what I had in mind (and I can write about hip and pelvic pain 'til
the cows come home). In fact
that second option of mixed mobility modes depending on immediate need works
even better for my secondary goal of educating people that disability isn't the
absolute situation they usually think it is. That decision also acted as a strong
driver towards cancer as the reason behind the disability, physical trauma can
cause amputation at those levels, but it's rare and usually very traumatic. Simultaneous with that
character concept I realised my disabled protagonist would need a strong female friend/partner to
bounce her issues off.
With a character concept, I now needed a plot for the
character to inhabit (yes, many people would argue this is back to front, but
it works for me). My initial concept was a Young Adult Urban Fantasy story, set
in small-town America in Washington's Olympic Peninsula - YA as it's a genre
I've not explored before (and bone cancer typically hits in the 10-20 age range), America to maximise marketability, Washington state
because I've gathered a lot of useful research writing the work in progress,
which is set in Seattle (and ultimately because during my engineering career I
was once nearly seconded to Seattle, a missed opportunity I've always
regretted). Then #WeNeedDiverseBooks came along and kicked my thinking into
higher gear, and a few weeks ago I happened to stumble over my earlier efforts
to create a crutch-using character while looking for something else entirely,
and realised that even if I wasn't satisfied with the disability background for
those - four different story starts, four different disabilities - the
character, and her background, former helicopter pilot, former officer,
engineering troubleshooter, in a lesbian relationship (that one surprised me, I
didn't think I'd become comfortable with LGBT issues that early in my writing,
but it tied in with the strong female companion idea I already had), would
actually mesh perfectly with the crutch-using amputee concept to give me a
character I could build a mystery novel around - so bye-bye YA Urban Fantasy
novel, and back to the rain-soaked streets of Seattle, where a hard rain's
gonna sweep away the fripperies of our character's life and focus her on the
things she truly values (Seattle was an enforced choice given I was plotting
this without internet access and needed a city I was reasonably familiar with,
but there are other elements that make it a good choice, such as the
aero-engineering degree offered by University of Washington, which was exactly
the one my character would have aimed for, and having the regional cancer
centre close at hand).
I had a five hour train journey the next day, and by the
time I got off at the other end, Emma Shannon had taken form, and started
talking to me, and I knew that the story I needed to write first was her origin
story, about how she made the switch from being Emma Shannon, aero-engineering
student at UDub and prospective Army helicopter pilot, to Emma Shannon, amputee
and cancer-survivor, and magnet for trouble. Ten days later I had 30,000 words
in the main story, 10,000 words of plot outline for a sequel, and a hell of a
lot of research for myself once I got back in range of a working internet link.
Doing the Research
One advantage of being a diverse author writing about your
own area of diversity is that you've grown up with much the research, but that
doesn't mean you're granted a complete pass, and if you aren't writing about a
group you're a member of, then you have an awful lot of research to look
forward to. So, having drafted my plot while in the land of
bugger-all-connectivity, I've spent the past fortnight reading up on stuff like
orthopaedic oncology, and listening to people on YouTube describing their
experience of cancer. I need to do a bunch more research before I can move
forward on the next section of the novel, reading up on the appropriate chemo
protocols for someone with that precise cancer, side-effects, other areas of
treatment (egg harvesting, central lines, and so on). Maybe you could skate
over that level of detail, but maybe that level of detail will take your story
to new depths. If you don't do the research, you'll never know.
Kill or Cure, Privilege-Check Yourself
A friend of mine noted that "When non-disabled writers
do disability; they'd always rather be dead." Unfortunately the reality is
that non-disabled people's understanding of living life as a disabled person is
both very limited and very clichéd. How often have you heard someone say
something like 'I'd rather be dead than in a wheelchair'? I use a wheelchair
occasionally, my reaction is more 'damn, this is liberating!' Equally you see
people talking about rather dying than being dependent on carers/personal assistants - all my
carer-using friends see them as just another aid to independence (though one
capable of holding a rather more animated conversation than your average
wheelchair), not as something/someone who somehow denies them their
independence. Disability may bring change, but so does non-disabled life, you
adapt and then it becomes your new normal, and not worthy of comment - this is
going to be a big theme in Emma's story.
And then there's the whole cure thing. Non-disabled people
tend to assume all of us disabled types really, really want to be cured. Erm,
no, my neurodiversity makes me who I am, while my mobility impairment really doesn't
matter to me either way, I can live the life I want with the limitations it
imposes quite comfortably, thank you. The only thing I'd really want rid of are
my pain levels, but even those are largely tolerable nowadays (though I've seen
non-disabled people conclude I'm lying when I describe them as they can't
imagine functioning with that level of ongoing pain - it's another example of
non-disabled imagination failing to understand disabled reality). Nor am I in
any way unusual in not wanting to be cured, it's true for many of the disabled
people I know, and in certain communities of disabled people, particularly Deaf
and neurodiverse, it's effectively the dominant position.
There are groups of disabled people who do want a cure, it
tends to be common in people with newly acquired disabilities, particularly
spinal cord injuries, because that's the truth beaten into people by society
long before they actually have the accident that disables them: that if someone
has an SCI then the only valid response is wanting to walk, anything else is
'giving up'. And sometimes the consequences of that programming are downright
tragic. Some people become so focused on getting back to where they were before
they were disabled, rather than moving forward with their life as a disabled
person, that it becomes their only reason for existence, and if a cure isn't
feasible, then that never ends well.
Marieke Nijkamp has a good discussion of the whole cure
debate here : The Trope of Curing Disability and DiversifYA has a discussion looking at disability issues and writing here.
There are similar divides around assisted
suicide/euthanasia, many disabled people see a need and are in favour, many
others see the need, but are opposed, because they also see it as a step back
down the slippery slope towards Eugenics and are convinced it will ultimately
lead to more suffering for disabled people than it prevents (I'm in the opposed
camp). That the opposed camp finds it more difficult to have their voices heard
in the media than the pro-camp is perhaps a demonstration of how people can
assign views to disabled people based on preconceived perceptions, not what
we actually think.
That non-disabled people so often advocate either curing us
or killing us as reasonable responses to disability may be one of the strongest
lessons you can internalise in trying to write from a disabled character's
viewpoint. Ultimately, if you aren't disabled, don't assume disabled people
will think the way you do, disability is strange to you, but not to us, so you
really do need to run your assumptions past someone who'll know if they are
appropriate or not (a fundamental truth for writing any kind of diverse
character).
Privilege-Check Your Other Characters
What goes for you the author also goes for the other
characters in your novel. Unless they are family or close friends of a disabled
person, they will have the typical uninformed normie background ('normie' is
slang for a non-disabled person, and reflects their assumption that we aren't normal).
Some people are so blind to disability that they don't see anything wrong with
advising a disabled person that they would kill themselves in the disabled
person's situation, or worse, advising the disabled person themselves to seek
euthanasia. Others are eager to 'help', so eager to 'help' that they will do
things that you have asked them not to, and be affronted if you are not
grateful. I once had a colleague hurl himself across a stairwell in order to
open a door for me. I didn't need help, he endangered me in doing it, he
insisted that he would keep doing it when asked not to, because he insisted he had been
taught that that was the polite thing to do for disabled people. Apparently my
views as an actual disabled person didn't count. (And I'm definitely recycling this
story into Emma's experiences!) The proper etiquette around these things is to
ask the disabled person if they need a hand, and then let them tell you what
needs doing. And there are those who will attack disabled people, whether
physically, verbally, or managerially (I've faced all three), because there is
some deep, twisted element of xenophobia in their character. Obviously not all
characters will be so negative, but elements of these behaviours and beliefs
are very widespread, with, for example, a large part of the UK population
convinced disability benefit fraud is rampant and that we are all scroungers -
it's actually the lowest fraud rate of any benefit, but try convincing Joe
Public that. Introducing a disabled person into your cast of characters should
force you to examine the attitude to disability of every character who
interacts significantly with them.
Being Disabled is a Political State of Being
A consequence of normie attitudes towards disability is that
disabled people have often had to become politicised through sheer
self-defence. Pretty much a universal truth is that disabled people are still
working through their own liberation struggle, trying to move towards society
treating us as equal in just the same way that non-White, non-Christian and
non-straight people have all had to seize their equality and force it on an
unwilling world. Unfortunately we're probably 20 years behind the other
liberation movements, and in many areas we're going backwards. The political
climate towards disabled people is very negative in the UK, with the dominant
narrative being that we're benefit scroungers, if not fakes and frauds, and from news reports I've seen it
seems to be turning that way in Australia and perhaps the US (though
complicated there by a wider and more entrenched antipathy towards social
benefits). Your story and your character's experiences don't have to address
that, there are many disabled people who never realise there is an active
political movement out there, and disabled children who haven't grown into
political activity yet, but it is out there, and so are the political drivers
that have made us rise up against them.
It's also worth noting that the language of disability
varies depending on country. As a British crip (a label we only allow amongst
ourselves, that isn't universally accepted and that generally points towards a politically active viewpoint), I
call myself a disabled person and talk about disablist discrimination, if I
were American, then I would call myself a person with disabilities and talk
about ableist discrimination. The differences aren't because we Brits missed
out on the whole person-first language thing, it is because of widespread
adoption by UK disabled activists of the Social Model of Disability, which
defines disability as the discrimination we experience because of society's
failure to adapt to our needs, which means when I declare myself as a disabled
person, I'm doing so as a comment on my position in society. Other
English-speaking countries vary in usage depending on whether the US or UK
disability movements have had most influence, or use both depending on the
individual.
Looking at the most generic disability terms, disability/disabled
is acceptable anywhere, handicap/handicapped is acceptable in the US but
not the UK, old-fashioned terms such as crippled and lame are
heavily disliked, retard/retarded is universally loathed as a
term of abuse and the cutesy differently abled, handicapable and the
like generally have disabled people rolling their eyes in sheer disbelief at
the cluelessness of people claiming to advocate for us.
Does He Take Sugar?
The meme which assumes disabled people are incapable of
answering for themselves is so entrenched among the non-disabled that it was
adopted as the title of one of the UK's early disability programmes. Even today
I still see disabled people, particularly wheelchair users, regularly reporting
instances in which the person, waitress, store clerk or whoever they are
dealing with instead addresses themselves to a family member, a carer/personal
assistant, or even a random passing stranger. That in many cases the disabled
person is far more highly educated than the person they are dealing with just
puts the assumption that disabled=mentally incapable into even harsher
contrast. There's a variation on this in which the disabled person is
addressed, but is offered completely inappropriate help. Deaf people being
offered restaurant menus in braille, blind people being offered a wheelchair in
airports, and wheelchair users being asked if they're really sure they can't
walk up a couple of steps happen so often they've practically become clichés of
disabled/non-disabled interactions.
How Am I? Ask Again in Five Minutes
Non-disabled people have a bizarre presumption that
disability is unchanging, which is unfortunate as it often leads to them
accusing disabled people of being fakes (about the worst thing you can say to a
disabled person) when the disabled person does something today that they said
they couldn't do yesterday. The reality is that even disabilities you would
imagine are unchangeable may have distinct variations on a frequent basis, and
for some of us our disabilities can vary from one moment to the next. If we
take my hypermobility issues (a connective tissue disorder), minor sprains,
even partial dislocations, are a normal part of moving around - I've got quite
a mild case, for many of my bendy friends full-on dislocations of major joints
are a daily occurrence - so my mobility can actually change between one step
and the next. The same thing goes for pain levels, which can also vary in
longer cycles of days, weeks, months at a time. Even an amputee, someone most
people will see as having an unchanging disability, will need to deal with
fluctuations in the precise size and shape of their stump as their weight and
fitness varies, and both amputees and people with paralysis will need to be
aware of, and deal with, potential skin-breakdown issues.
Inspiration Porn, It's Not Exactly Inspiring
Inspiration-Porn is disabled peoples' term for the kind of
poster that shows someone with a very visible disability and then says 'What's
your excuse?' or the like. It's not normally seen as a negative for disabled
people by the non-disabled, but it undermines our equality in two distinct and
opposite ways. The first praises us as outstanding and exceeding all reasonable
expectations simply for getting out of bed in the morning, undermining any real
achievements we might have made. I was once patted on the head by a local
politician, I was 30+, working on cutting-edge aerospace projects, yet add a
wheelchair to the equation and he thought it was appropriate to pat me on the
head as though I was a child for being out with a friend on a Saturday. The
second form is even more insidious, it raises disabled people like Paralympians
up on a pedestal, and then uses them as a club to beat other disabled people
with for not achieving as much.
If you want to write a novel about disability for either of
these reasons, please stop now. On the other hand, they're something that a
disabled character may have to address, especially if they find someone trying
to put them on a pedestal - that's something I have planned for Emma Shannon.
Disability is Expensive
Even with a relatively stable disability, disabled people
will often face expenses that are significantly higher than non-disabled people
imagine. High-end prosthetics can cost $50,000 and more, and need replacing
every few years (much more frequently for growing kids). If the state does
provide prosthetics as part of the medical system, then often that won't extend
to the modern computer-controlled 'bionic' types that get all the TV coverage
nowadays. Some disabled people have annual medication costs that might
comfortably buy a small house. A powered wheelchair can easily exceed the
sticker price of a small or even medium-sized car if it needs any sort of
customisation, and an individually-fitted manual chair (essential for most
full-time wheelies) will be dearer than many second-hand cars. Equally car
adaptions can be very expensive - the only disability-specific adaption my car
has is a steering knob, which only cost me a few pounds, but my driving license
restricts me to automatics only, which generally rules out the smallest model
in any manufacturer's range, and often enough the cheaper options of their next
size up - needing an automatic added around 50% to the cost of the smallest
practical car that addressed my needs. Add the need to carry and load a large
wheelchair or other mobility equipment, and costs can shoot through the roof.
Add specialist controls and you're talking thousands more. Similarly I don't
have any physical adaptions to my house, but my heating is on year round,
because anything under about 21C and my joints seize up, so my heating bills
are significantly higher than would be expected and fuel poverty and needing to
choose between heating and eating are far more common discussions than disabled
people would like, or non-disabled people would imagine.
For someone without a medically-stable disability,
disability-related medical costs can quickly mount, even in countries where
direct healthcare costs are taken care of. I know people who have to spend
hundreds of pounds at a time in travel costs for hospital visits, because the
specialist they need isn't local and their disability complicates their travel
arrangements. If you consider that my record for hospital visits in one year is
in the high twenties (even with a stable situation I've had ten so far this
year), then the potential costs soon become apparent. If you aren't in a
country where direct healthcare costs are borne by the state, then becoming
disabled can be a short-cut to bankruptcy, and that's a reality your character
will have to deal with, it's certainly a reality Emma will be facing in my
story.
Striking a Balance
There is a balance to be drawn between illustrating how
disability means differences in a character's life and prurient detail. For
instance, Laura, the paraplegic protagonist in Graveyard Shift, my
work-in-progress, is inevitably going to be using a catheter and other
continence control techniques, and she even spends several scenes in the
bathroom having major discussions with her BFF and fellow protagonist, but
there's no need for me to detail precisely how she manages her continence, just
as I wouldn't discuss the details of a non-disabled character using the toilet
in a similar situation, unless it becomes significant to the plot (or I'm
trying to do some audience education). There probably is a point in the story
at which Laura has to temporarily switch from intermittent to indwelling
catheterisation, but seeing as the physical incapacitation that would drive
that is more than adequately discussed in other ways, that change in toileting
isn't something I actually need to detail. Again this is somewhere that the
input of an actual disabled person may be valuable.
Other Worlds, Other Times
Disability isn't simply a phenomenon of 20th Century Earth,
it existed in the past, it will exist in the future, it will exist in
alternate, secondary worlds. If you are writing in our own past, then you need
to look at the historical record of how society has reacted to disability, and
it is a rarely pretty tale. Our situation today, flawed though it may be, is
many times better than it has been through most of history. The Spartans and
many other civilizations exposed disabled infants on the hillsides, the
Victorians locked us away in asylums, and we're still trying to close down the
last vestiges of that phenomenon, while the Nazis tried to obliterate us in Aktion
T4, the precursor to the Holocaust. But even the Nazi implementation of
Eugenics was only the tip of an iceberg, Eugenics gained traction all over the
developed world, with compulsory sterilization of disabled people happening
from the USA (the Supreme Court famously ruling in Buck vs Bell that
"Three generations of imbeciles are enough") to Sweden to Australia,
and cases still crop up today.
The future raises further questions. Has disability
liberation progressed? Has medical and prosthetic technology progressed? And
has that progression led to societal pressures to accept a cure? One of the
most famous SF works with a disability theme is Anne McCaffrey's The Ship
Who Sang, in which a disabled baby, Helva, is locked away in a 'shell' and
trained to become the living core of a spaceship. The novel was written in the
'60s, so essentially predates the disability liberation movement, but for
modern disabled people the portrayal of disability is deeply disturbing. For a
start only the brightest disabled children get this treatment, for the rest
it's implied they'll be killed; then there's the infantilisation, Helva's
physical development is deliberately stunted to keep her at a convenient size,
and last of all it's a literal embodiment of the disabled person being locked
away in the attic, with Helva not just locked away in the shell, but then
locked away a second time behind the control console of the spaceship she
becomes. As an example of how not to do a disabled character in the future, The
Ship Who Sang is difficult to beat.
A more recent example shows a similar tone-deafness towards
the feelings of disabled people, in David Weber's Honor Harrington books
the major plot arc that's been developing for nearly 20 books suddenly turns on
the different ways that two civilizations approach medical ethics. The bad guys
kill an autistic child (a clichéd idiot savant), because while her maths skills
were up to scratch her autistic traits were too much of a nuisance, and then,
to show how much better the good guys are, one of their leaders remarks how
they had 'cured' autism centuries ago - cue the entire population of
neurodiverse geeks beating their head against a wall at the sheer cluelessness
of imposing a 'cure' on our fundamental self-identity.
For secondary worlds, worlds which are not ours, there is a
freedom to develop how their societies interact with disability, but those
interactions will have grown out of physical, social and economic drivers. In a
subsistence economy, someone who isn't physically able to farm will be in a
problematic situation, in a warlike society, someone who can't fight may find
it difficult to gain respect, and so on. The freedom is there to shape
reactions to disability all of your own, but they need to be believable within
the society as a whole.
Pulling It All Together
Creating a disabled protagonist is much like creating any
other character, but the reality of disabled life means that there is a much
higher risk of scoring a critical failure on your audience's suspension of disbelief
if you haven't done the right research and thought through the essential
issues. Ultimately, the interaction of plot, world and character may be much
more tightly coupled than in a work with a non-disabled protagonist. I hope
this won't stop people from trying, we really do need diverse books in which
realistic disabled characters take centre stage, especially books by disabled
authors, but we also need those characters to reflect our reality as disabled
people, not the reality non-disabled people imagine for us.
Closing Note
I'd like this to be a useful resource for anyone trying to
create a disabled character, so if you can think of anything I haven't covered,
and that isn't specific to a particular disability, or if you think I'm approaching something in the wrong way, then let me know in the comments
and I'll see what I can do.
