I can't remember exactly what fandoms I've written disabled characters in over the years, but I did two Supernatural AUs very recently, one with a blind character and another with a mute character, and I can remember writing two fics for The Dark is Rising with blind characters, very vividly. I can't say that there's characters with disabilities in the majority of my fanfic, because the canons don't have m/any disabled characters, but I do like to explore the possibility. I've RPed more than I've written, though.
I was in a creative writing class recently where several of us had some kind of disability or were strongly connected to people with disabilities (the lecturer has lost several fingers from one of his hands, one of the girls has to use a wheelchair, and there were a couple of people with hearing problems). I turned in a piece with a disabled character in the first week, and they were stunned that I had done such a thing -- not so much the abled people, who didn't even get that the character was disabled (it was in first person, so the disability wasn't spelled out), but the people with disabilities. They hadn't even thought, it seemed, that anyone would be interested in writing/reading disabled characters. It was a very odd experience for me, but we then discussed why disabled characters are so few and far between, so the outcome was good (now let's hope some of the others will apply what they learned...). But still, if even disabled people don't write about characters with disabilities...
I definitely write out what scares me. I searched my ficjournal for the word "cancer" and returned only one result (in thousands of fics), which was a very vague reference to someone dying offstage (as it were).
(And now I wonder if me writing about disability, especially blindness, is me going "you don't scare me!" at it in hopes of convincing myself, but that's neither here nor there.)
no subject
I was in a creative writing class recently where several of us had some kind of disability or were strongly connected to people with disabilities (the lecturer has lost several fingers from one of his hands, one of the girls has to use a wheelchair, and there were a couple of people with hearing problems). I turned in a piece with a disabled character in the first week, and they were stunned that I had done such a thing -- not so much the abled people, who didn't even get that the character was disabled (it was in first person, so the disability wasn't spelled out), but the people with disabilities. They hadn't even thought, it seemed, that anyone would be interested in writing/reading disabled characters. It was a very odd experience for me, but we then discussed why disabled characters are so few and far between, so the outcome was good (now let's hope some of the others will apply what they learned...). But still, if even disabled people don't write about characters with disabilities...
I definitely write out what scares me. I searched my ficjournal for the word "cancer" and returned only one result (in thousands of fics), which was a very vague reference to someone dying offstage (as it were).
(And now I wonder if me writing about disability, especially blindness, is me going "you don't scare me!" at it in hopes of convincing myself, but that's neither here nor there.)