I am relatively abled at this point in time, though I do have hearing difficulties, but my father is physically disabled (back problems, multiple motorcycle crash injuries, etc) and deaf, and my mother is losing her sight (it's likely my sister and I will too). I'm starting to feel like a laundry list here, so I'll stop: suffice it to say there's plenty of disability that directly affects me.
I write about disability (or rather, include disabled people) in my fiction (some fanfiction, some original) because I think it's important and I think it likely always will be a part of life. It certainly surrounds my life, more than I usually acknowledge. There's a strong temptation for me to write disability out of it, though: to create a world where I wouldn't have to fear losing my sight, or losing more of my hearing, where I wouldn't have to sit on the end of a phone line and hear my mother tell me she can no longer read books and not be able to do a damn thing. When writing, we control the world entirely: I could write out the things I fear, and keep it safe. If my mother wrote fiction, I couldn't condemn her for making a world in which she wouldn't have to go through this.
Personally, obviously, I don't write about a safe world. I don't believe in it. If I'm not going to fear blindness or deafness or cancer or not being able to walk, there'll be something else to fear. There always is. Still, I wonder how much of the lack of representation of disability is not because writers are dismissing people who are "not normal" -- though that's the effect -- but because people write out what scares them.
no subject
I write about disability (or rather, include disabled people) in my fiction (some fanfiction, some original) because I think it's important and I think it likely always will be a part of life. It certainly surrounds my life, more than I usually acknowledge. There's a strong temptation for me to write disability out of it, though: to create a world where I wouldn't have to fear losing my sight, or losing more of my hearing, where I wouldn't have to sit on the end of a phone line and hear my mother tell me she can no longer read books and not be able to do a damn thing. When writing, we control the world entirely: I could write out the things I fear, and keep it safe. If my mother wrote fiction, I couldn't condemn her for making a world in which she wouldn't have to go through this.
Personally, obviously, I don't write about a safe world. I don't believe in it. If I'm not going to fear blindness or deafness or cancer or not being able to walk, there'll be something else to fear. There always is. Still, I wonder how much of the lack of representation of disability is not because writers are dismissing people who are "not normal" -- though that's the effect -- but because people write out what scares them.