How Authors Can Do Disability Representation Right

I am an “elder millennial” author and when I started writing, the Internet barely existed, there were no such things as ebooks, and self-publishing was a daunting and expensive endeavor. I have witnessed all of those things change.

As someone who has been involved in disability rights since the 1990s, I’ve witnessed the role of disability in fiction change too.

For a long time disabled characters were most often put into one of two categories: bitter villain or inspirational angel. Lazy authors leaned on disability as a quick and easy backstory for their antagonists and others saw disability as shorthand for an inhuman level of patience, grace, and wise advice.

Saw that as recently as the final episode of the Game Of Thrones show where somehow Bran was the perfect ruler because…he was disabled and stared off into space a lot? Said vague mysterious things? (And yet the portrayal of Tyrion Lannister was excellent, and I’ll talk more about that in a moment, so perhaps it’s that the TV writers were not as careful with these things as the book author).

What both of these opposite stereotypes have in common is that they utilize disabled characters for what they can represent to the able-bodied characters and readers.

For many years there has been no nuance in the portrayal of disability in fiction and the stories of disabled characters have been a two-dimensional foil for the story of the other characters.

Finally a push has come for more accurate representation and OwnVoices. There’s some problems with #ownvoices, especially in that it forces authors to disclose personal information they may not want to, but I appreciate the move towards listening to disabled people about their stories.

Disabled characters deserve to have the same dimensionality as any others. Authors need to stop relying on disabilities as a shorthand for what they think it represents. The biggest problem with doing this is the way it perpetuates ableism in the real world. Because disability doesn’t represent anything by itself.

The idea of diverse representation in fiction has two purposes.

One is for all types of people to see themselves in the stories of their community. Without that kind of visibility, people become isolated from the communities they are supposed to be part of, which can have devastating consequences on them throughout their lives and is harmful to the community as a whole as well. The other is for people who don’t have that experience to realize that those who seem different are still people with very relatable and similar hopes and dreams to them.

Without that part of it, abled people see the disabled people around them as the angels and devils in books, not human beings just like them.

What representation does when it is not just a token effort is it provides so many different stories and perspectives that the occasional stereotype isn’t going to have as big an impact on real people. Sometimes people really do become stuck and bitter from their experience of disability but from what we’ve seen in our books and movies, we could easily think that happens 99.9% of the time.

Think about how you treat someone who wears glasses.

The same as anyone else, right? You don’t even notice or care (unless they’ve got awesome frames!). It’s the same thing for mobility devices like wheelchairs, canes, or scooters. Glasses are a form of adaptive technology but we don’t read a lot into it or get weird about it because wearing glasses is so common. It’s all around us.

This is not to say that the disability experience doesn’t come with challenges. It is part of someone’s story. An example of this is why I said earlier that Tyrion was good representation. His disability and the way he is treated because of it is a central part of his story, however the book centered what it meant to him rather than what his story could represent to able-bodied people. Like every other character, Tyrion had his hopes, ambitions, weaknesses, strengths, and relationships. His disability colored each of those things but was not his only character trait. It was an aspect of his experience.

While I do see more disabled characters in fiction now than in past decades (and even sometimes nuanced and compelling storytelling about disability in recent years), there are always exceptions to generalizations. An interesting example of good representation from the past is actually Treasure Island.

Because of the movie adaptations and the general impression we have about the character of Long John Silver even if we haven’t read the book, it’s easy to think that he is a stereotype of the bitter villain. Yet his character in the novel is complex, nuanced, and compelling.

Long John Silver is an amputee. He does not wear a peg leg (though he is often portrayed that way in media). He uses a single crutch, his amputation is close to the hip. The source of his disability is never brought up in the book. The pirate life is a rough one and that’s as much as we know about how he may have lost his leg.

Is he a villian? Certainly he is an antagonist but it is not easy to pin down his motives. He is one of the most complex characters I’ve ever read. The source of his bitterness has nothing to do with disability and everything to do with the injustice of privileged rich men going after a treasure that he and his comrades actually deserve. He is a deeply relatable antagonist along the lines of Magneto or Killmonger.

For an example of bad representation in a more recent book there is Will in Me Before You. This book and movie adaptation are fawned over by many able-bodied people. Words used to describe it are “emotional,” “heartbreaking,” and…” inspirational.” People who don’t have relationships with any disabled people in real life feel like they’ve learned about the experience from it.

However, you can’t learn about disability experience from that book because the author has no relationships with any disabled people either.

She read a newspaper article that inspired the story and she forced the characters into the ending that she envisioned even as the story and characters were clearly going in a different direction. When I finished reading the book it took a few minutes to realize what was making me the most uncomfortable.

Will had a point-of-view chapter before the injury that resulted in a high-level spinal cord injury. Once he is quadriplegic, there is never another chapter with his perspective. In that whole long book he is only speaking for himself before he is disabled.

You might say, isn’t it the female main character who narrates everything except the prologue? And while she does have the majority of the chapters, there are random chapters throughout from other points of view, such as Will’s mother. His disability experience is all about what it represents to the people around him, to the readers, and especially to the author.

When we see disabled people around us in our literature and our communities (and one helps lead into the other), we can all finally realize that we’re all just people with our own complex and unique stories.

[image error]