Once again, it’s all about writing what you know!
If you think using a wheelchair would make you feel trapped, isolated, broken, and shunned, you might assume your character would feel trapped, isolated, broken, and shunned. But they might not be.
For some, a wheelchair represents freedom, the ability to get out and about autonomously; it is a device that makes more possible a life full of friends and work and opportunity—on different terms.
Disabled people have always been represented in storytelling. We’re talking the big hitters: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens.
Disability provokes the strongest of emotions.
There have always been successful disabled authors, but historically they don’t tend to write disabled characters. Novels written by disabled authors are still vanishingly rare.
Writers of disabled literature must invoke the readers’ pity, before inspiring them.
For Victorian and Edwardian writers there was no such category as “books about disabled children”. There were books that included children who were ill, blind or unable to walk. However, the purpose of the story was never to show the kind of life a disabled child might live. The idea that these writers were perpetuating a view about people with a real life impairment, suggesting that such a life was hardly worth living, would probably have astonished them.
Their aim was largely didactic and within the framework of warm and affectionate family stories, young readers were learning lessons on how to overcome selfishness or a too strong-will, and how to conform to traditional roles and gender expectations.
There was a time when disability and illness were used as metaphors. It was a device to bring the story through a period of trial or desolation into the bright light of resolution and happy ending.
Disability is everywhere in literature, across all periods and genres, whether in medieval saints’ narratives.
In the late 1960’s and ’70’s, there was a new kind of realism in children’s books. Topics once considered too sophisticated, emotionally upsetting or demanding are now deemed appropriate for young readers. There was a new climate which made it possible for writers to explore complicated, less easy to resolve subjects like divorce, death, bullying, racism, sex and disability which it was harder to resolve with a simple, sentimental ending.
Many literary villains are disabled, providing a metaphorical shortcut to ideas of deviance, bitterness or desire for revenge.
Unleash the novel inside you
with compelling characters,
intricate worlds,
and fine-tuned prose.