I think I've talked to you about this before, but one of my own favorite characters is Alfred, who is blind. Alfred has his roots in a couple of previous characters, however. I first created a blind character when I was in my early teens (I was always thinking of ways characters could be different, being terribly in love with the outsider trope). I wasn't really that comfortable with a character actually behaving like a blind person, though. I loaded him up with magic so he could get around just fine, read print, and of course, he was even more awesome than the characters who could see. (Or he would've been if every character in the story wasn't so incredibly overpowered.) He was still a musician, though, like I couldn't think of any other job a blind person would do. I should point out that I was terrified of going blind as a little kid (thanks to a convergence of a terrible fever and an episode of Little House on the Prairie) so I think this was my way of working through that.
Not long after that, I guess awareness came with age and I started growing very concerned about how I represented my characters. I started actually doing research on things and decided this character just wasn't where I wanted to go with this. What was even the point of this guy being blind if he had so many powers? I switched over to another character, who had lost his sight in his teens and...well, I think he was a pretty good character. He was angry that he'd lost his sight, but he didn't stay stuck there, nor did he come to some amazing revelation due to a sighted person (or any person, for that matter, he had to work through it himself). He also had some compensating magic, but in some ways, it frustrated him more because people around him would say, "But you have that magic, could've been a lot worse." I wrote stories about him spanning thirty years and he eventually came to terms with his disability (mostly, but then, he was depressed even before he lost his sight), got married and had children. I loved that character, but he was not a very good YA character at all. Most of his arc happened in adulthood. (Plus he cursed like crazy...) And his life was way too boring for a fantasy book character.
Alfred happened kind of accidentally from a little side story, but I was glad he did. For one thing, all that research didn't have to go to waste... For another thing, as the blind heir to an organized crime family, he came preloaded with lots of...well, STORY. He's a dynamic character but not terribly gifted, magic-wise. But man, has it been hard to write him. It's taken a lot of tweaking of passages for me to stop getting comments from critiquers like "Why doesn't he want his sight back?" and "How does he know X happened if he's blind?" It was very frustrating because after all my research and years of writing three different blind characters, I could barely even remember what I had originally thought about blind people.
But, looking back, it was sort of like I went through these different stages of coping with a disability via my characters and my feelings about disability really changed over the years, so I hope that translates into writing better characters.
On another note, my significant other has pretty severe arthritis that goes back to his teens, and when I got together with him, and shared my writing with him, he really liked that I had blind characters in my stories who do things because he didn't see a lot of good disabled characters in stories either. Which has made me more aware of how less obvious disabilities like juvenile arthritis are almost NEVER represented. It's always the obvious sort of blind/deaf/wheelchair/missing limb. So, someday I want to write a character drawing from his experiences and broaden the field a bit too.
It's pretty hard to think of good disabled characters in stories... Ergh.
(wow, this got so long I actually exceeded the maximum character length. what the heck I DIDN"T KNOW THERE WAS A MAX CHARACTER LENGTH IN LJ! I need to go eat lunch!!)
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I think I've talked to you about this before, but one of my own favorite characters is Alfred, who is blind. Alfred has his roots in a couple of previous characters, however. I first created a blind character when I was in my early teens (I was always thinking of ways characters could be different, being terribly in love with the outsider trope). I wasn't really that comfortable with a character actually behaving like a blind person, though. I loaded him up with magic so he could get around just fine, read print, and of course, he was even more awesome than the characters who could see. (Or he would've been if every character in the story wasn't so incredibly overpowered.) He was still a musician, though, like I couldn't think of any other job a blind person would do. I should point out that I was terrified of going blind as a little kid (thanks to a convergence of a terrible fever and an episode of Little House on the Prairie) so I think this was my way of working through that.
Not long after that, I guess awareness came with age and I started growing very concerned about how I represented my characters. I started actually doing research on things and decided this character just wasn't where I wanted to go with this. What was even the point of this guy being blind if he had so many powers? I switched over to another character, who had lost his sight in his teens and...well, I think he was a pretty good character. He was angry that he'd lost his sight, but he didn't stay stuck there, nor did he come to some amazing revelation due to a sighted person (or any person, for that matter, he had to work through it himself). He also had some compensating magic, but in some ways, it frustrated him more because people around him would say, "But you have that magic, could've been a lot worse." I wrote stories about him spanning thirty years and he eventually came to terms with his disability (mostly, but then, he was depressed even before he lost his sight), got married and had children. I loved that character, but he was not a very good YA character at all. Most of his arc happened in adulthood. (Plus he cursed like crazy...) And his life was way too boring for a fantasy book character.
Alfred happened kind of accidentally from a little side story, but I was glad he did. For one thing, all that research didn't have to go to waste... For another thing, as the blind heir to an organized crime family, he came preloaded with lots of...well, STORY. He's a dynamic character but not terribly gifted, magic-wise. But man, has it been hard to write him. It's taken a lot of tweaking of passages for me to stop getting comments from critiquers like "Why doesn't he want his sight back?" and "How does he know X happened if he's blind?" It was very frustrating because after all my research and years of writing three different blind characters, I could barely even remember what I had originally thought about blind people.
But, looking back, it was sort of like I went through these different stages of coping with a disability via my characters and my feelings about disability really changed over the years, so I hope that translates into writing better characters.
On another note, my significant other has pretty severe arthritis that goes back to his teens, and when I got together with him, and shared my writing with him, he really liked that I had blind characters in my stories who do things because he didn't see a lot of good disabled characters in stories either. Which has made me more aware of how less obvious disabilities like juvenile arthritis are almost NEVER represented. It's always the obvious sort of blind/deaf/wheelchair/missing limb. So, someday I want to write a character drawing from his experiences and broaden the field a bit too.
It's pretty hard to think of good disabled characters in stories... Ergh.
(wow, this got so long I actually exceeded the maximum character length. what the heck I DIDN"T KNOW THERE WAS A MAX CHARACTER LENGTH IN LJ! I need to go eat lunch!!)