DeLevely

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Oct 8th, 2018
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  1. I happen to work with wonderful writers and GMs who provide an excellent examples of talking about disabled characters. If you watch how Rick Budd or Eric Campbell narrate disabled characters, they signal a character's disability, not by flashing an expository neon "THEY'RE DISABLED!" sign over their head, but through character action: a character "rolls up" to something instead of "walks." They put their crutches to the side and sit down.
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  3. All this equally applies to invisible mobility disabilities: describing a character's gait, stretching a stiff hip, or sitting down to wait for someone rather than remaining standing.
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  5. Both of those GMs also do a great job of describing environments in ways that provide details the disabled character would want to know: are there stairs? Are the hallways wide or narrow? What is the ground material/texture? The description implicitly follows the train-of-thought of the characters (because Porg knows that I always have a little part of my brain assessing the accessibility of whatever situation I'm in).
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  7. We see the characters' actions, the things they notice about the world, and how they relate to their fellow characters. It doesn't need to be as much about big sweeping notions of acknowledging "ability" or "disability" as recounting the way a person does the things that are relevant to the story and to their character. Rick and Eric's GM style both allow for that sweet spot where the characters' disabilities aren't incidental ("they just HAPPEN to be disabled"), but 99% of the time it's the other story elements that merit attention. Phoenix on Tempting Fate: Evil Dead does use a wheelchair and DOES use people's perceptions of disability to their advantage during the story, and the rest of the time, their propensity for violence with exotic weaponry is WAY more relevant!
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  9. (Side note, because it comes up a lot: in fiction, I rarely see the need to introduce the character with prurient details of medical history unless the story is ABOUT that. I see it in a lot of nondisabled authors' work: when an introductory character description includes detailed formal medical diagnoses, it ends up sounding like the writing equivalent of those strangers who walk up to me and ask "hey so what's wrong with your legs?")
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  11. All in all, what I'm talking about is show-don't-tell writing as applied to disability: we see Lacy use a wheelchair, for example, right from the first few sentences of their first scene when they get out of bed and their chair wakes up. It's not commented upon or belabored, any more than we stop the story to comment on their sensory processing or social anxiety. But we see how those traits butt up against a world that has ladders and stairs and crowds and noise, and we learn about who Lacy is by how they react to those situations.
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  13. Hope this gave you some ideas!
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