Hey! Usually, Saturdays are for art, right?
Well, I don’t really have that much art. Though if I did a day for every illustration and chapter header in my books, it might be closer. Anyway, I decided I don’t have enough ‘Fantastic Ramblings’ for every other week, or enough art for every Saturday except the first of the month. So why not put them together, since even then I doubt I have enough?
I never think of myself as writing disabilities or one kind of “representation” or another.
One of the things that has characterized my writing for a very long time is that I’m telling the stories of the people who are my characters. There might be a fairly tight plot, or there might be no plot at all, but that’s all rather incidental, at least to my approach. I might know a good deal of the plot from the beginning, but if that’s so, it’s because I know my character. I often do see them near-ish the end of the story, so that means I sometimes know a fair amount about what they’ve been through and done, and what their relationships to others and their world is.
But I am writing the story of the person who is my character.
That means I don’t adhere to one story arc or theme or set of tropes, or another. They might appear; they might not. But they’re not the focus.
The focus of the story is on my characters and their lives and responses and problems. What happens to them, and how they respond to it. I never set out to write a character who has one kind of disability or another (in some cases, I don’t agree with many people about what is a ‘disability’: for example, I am dyslexic. In certain contexts, that is a ‘disability’. I’ve had conversations with acquaintances who insisted dyslexia is a learning disability; and for some things, it is. There are things (like phonetic reading) that I can’t learn. But dyslexia is also an ability, and if it were the norm, in a society built around it, it would be the people who aren’t dyslexic who would be considered to have the ‘learning disability’.)
But my characters get injured and they endure traumas. Sometimes, they’re healed, almost miraculously, from things that would have killed them, with relatively little damage: perhaps, the injuries will bother them in twenty years, but they certainly do not at the moment. But, other times, the magic isn’t there or it can’t quite do that, can’t completely heal everything. And they have to live with it. I’ve always hated how, in much fantasy, this isn’t something we’re shown: people get injured all the time, but even if it takes a while, they always recover fully. Or at least almost always.
Sometimes, they don’t.
Camilla’s Radiance (Heart of Fire, the Dragon-Mage series) fell out of the sky, and broke a lot of bones in her body and wings. Due to the help of Serrose’s and Alian’s magic, she survived and healed. She can even fly – fairly well. Well enough to dive and hunt. But her joints bother her, especially when it’s cold. She’ll never be as nimble in the air as she could have been, or enjoy the kinds of flying she might have, if that had not happened. Sometimes, she pushes it, because it’s in her nature and she wants to fly, and hunt, and dive, even if it’s painful. But it is painful, and it’s somewhat progressive, so as she ages it will get worse and more limiting in general, and it affects how she can experience life.
Even if it’s not a major point of the story, it is something that the reader is reminded of sometimes (like, for example, when they’re trying to keep Radiance warm even though the other dragons wouldn’t need the extra care), but it’s not the main plot point. Camilla and Radiance happen to have plenty of other problems between them, and Radiance has a milder temperament than her rider and isn’t that angry about it.
But if you’re looking for it to be miraculously cured half-way through book two (as happens with Eragon’s wound from Durza), sorry, but that isn’t happening. Sometimes, it’ll be better. Sometimes, it’ll be worse. But it’s not getting cured.
Jaryle (Epoch of the Promise: Dawn Unseen, Epoch of the Promise: Wings of Healing) has another injury that doesn’t fully heal. The arm and hand he injured is never as strong or flexible again. It affects how he does things sometimes. It means he’d have trouble with certain things. Once again – not a big point of the story. Even less of a deal than Radiance’s injury.
Lauray (Epoch of the Promise: Wings of Healing) limps. Thrown into a dungeon for decades, and tortured, it’s definitely left its mark on her. Both physically, and emotionally. Something is different about her mind, too, but I’m not comfortable calling it a disability. I am concerned she might be angry with me if I did, and she would certainly be angry if I wasn’t careful about how I said it and what precisely I said. (As with people being blind often having abilities other people don’t nurture, that can be the case with other things you lose as well.)
Honestly, I’m not going to go through the list of characters who sustain injuries that affect their lives. I have quite a few. Not by any means, all – at least as long as we’re talking about the strictly or primarily physical. About things that can be easily quantified. There’s Silmavalien, who falls down a cliff and breaks a number of bones. She heals quite nicely, and her injuries don’t affect her, and certainly not while she’s young. Eldor, likewise, heals quite well from his wounds. And, so far, I haven’t written any characters who are truly crippled – at least, not in the published books. I have a potential Work-In-Progress or two with characters who sustain injuries that have a much greater effect on what they’re able to do.
But I don’t market my books as disability representation, and I don’t feel like doing so, or like calling them that. I’m just writing about people who have things happen to them. They’re not representation of anything other than the fact stuff happens. I don’t write them to be a representation or model of how other people react to things. I certainly hope they are consistent characters, who are true to human nature. But they are their own people, with their own responses determined by their unique human (or not-quite-human) nature, which might be different from you would expect.
I honestly don’t know, since I don’t specifically “research” and I certainly don’t categorize things well – and I’m not even convinced that what I’d get if I did would actually be the common, normal human responses. I don’t know if there is such a thing, but I do know that people have diverse personalities that affect how they respond and deal with things quite a lot. I also know that culture affects people a great deal. It affects how they behave – and it affects what other people see. What kinds of stories get told or noticed. How things like sanity and insanity get categorized and seen. A response seen as healthy and ideal in one culture, may be seen as the epitome of a damaged mind and soul in another. So I try not to judge my character’s responses too much, as well, though I’m not sure if I’ve always been successful in this.
A case in point of how vastly different cultures can be is, torture. Pardon me, but this is one where I happen to have enough breadth to say something. That wasn’t driven by research, though. It’s driven by … well, largely by my utter terror of torture that – well, has definitely affected my life at times, and has produced a fair amount of interest in my part on how to be … well, I’d rather not be ruled by that terror.
To read much of modern writing, many modern posts on how to write, and so forth, you would believe that everyone must be terrified of torture, that everyone has a breaking point, sooner or later, at which they can be got to betray anything and everything. And that everyone must come out of it a crushed and miserable wreck, with anger problems or severe depression, or both. Anything else is extremely idealistic, and if it breaks that mold completely, utterly unrealistic and inhuman.
But if you look at history and different cultures, that isn’t true. People do and have endured what others consider unendurable. They have not only survived what seems unsurvivable, but their attitude and emotions has been – judging by many of these common articles – utterly unrealistic and inhuman. And they haven’t betrayed. These experiences that a lot of modern posts emphasize have happened; but it’s hardly been everyone’s experience, and there’ve certainly been enough exceptions that … well, that they’re known about. Acknowledged. Recognized.
Not all peoples and cultures have even viewed the prospect in the same way. As a people, attitudes vary widely, and don’t have to be cringing terror. As strange as it might seem to some people, it’s actually possible to have a different outlook.
I’m not saying whether I understand it or not. I’m not getting into a conversation here, about this topic in specific. What I am saying is – there’s a lot of variety and diversity out there. This topic is, I think, adequate to suggest that quite strongly. If people’s attitudes and experiences can be that different about something like this, they can be very different about other things as well.
I believe that my characters, their experiences (apart perhaps from the wildly magical – though that’s a separate discussion), and their reactions are at least more or less true to human nature. There’s a lot more diversity and possibility in human nature than I think anyone realizes. But that doesn’t make them representation of anything. And I don’t want anyone to be disappointed because they expected to see representation of themselves (or something else), and instead they saw something that fits into and flows out of a very different kind of culture and attitude towards life.
I’m just trying to write true to my characters and how they see the world. One way or another. That’s why I write, anyways.
I might sometimes be able to express that some of my books have physical disability representation (since, sometimes it’s pretty obvious that there’s representation of the fact that sometimes injuries affect you for life; there’s much less cultural bias in the fact of physical limitations – how they’re responded to, viewed, and dealt with, yes, but in the sheer fact of their existence, it’s less so). But when it comes to the mental and emotional side of things, it’s a lot more complicated and I’m not comfortable saying much of anything, except that my characters are affected by their experiences, and I write about that. In fact, for all that my novels are often high and epic fantasy, I write far more about that than about the fighting and training (whether with magic or weapons), and battles, and other plot stuff that dominates that genre.
If you liked this post – or found it interesting – there’s a possibility you might enjoy some of my novels!
You can take a look at them here.
Enthralled By Love 