When the Disability Doesn’t Match

A client reached out to me a week or so ago. They are disabled, and they were reading a book in which the main character becomes disabled and then, this:

Thing that gets me: When the character can handle seemingly anything and can heal so quick.

The problem wasn’t suspension of disbelief but how that made them feel: diminished, incapable, weak by comparison.

And know what? My client wasn’t wrong. In fact, they had a very very valid point–which is why I’m writing about it today.

Here’s what I said to my client:

The problem here is the plot. It needs an able-bodied heroine instead if it being a plot built around the hero’s disabilities.

I almost heard the aha despite the miles between us.

This is something I think many of us — writers, editors, readers, and more — take for granted. That unless we live with a disability, we don’t know how hard it is. And maybe there’s a bit of naive hope and expectation that we’ll just… magically heal and stop being hurt or injured or… disabled.

(I ran into this attitude a lot after my bike injury, and certainly when each of my kids severed toxic relationships with their dad. “Oh, maybe one day they’ll reconcile.”)

I get it. It’s awkward and uncomfortable when the people we’re talking about — be them your friend’s kids (or the kids of an acquaintance) or a character in a book — aren’t at their best. Look at how much that message of being the best is wrapped into fiction (books, TV, and movies). Think about how the Chosen One is an entire plot line of its own, and how it is always always always a misfit who finds belonging by becoming The Chosen One. How they rise above and become the, if not perfect then able-bodied, savior.

We don’t want to see our characters struggle with something simple like their health. We want them to be perfect, the sort of hero/heroine/savior we would be in their place. We need them to be capable of everything that gets thrown at them… even when that “everything” is something only an able-bodied character can face.

So if you’re going to write a disabled character — or maybe more to the point with my client’s book, if you’re going to disable your character as part of the story — make sure that the plot adapts for their disability. Whatever that looks like.

Your disabled character deserves their happy ending and their love interest and their triumph, too. It just may not look like the triumph of an able-bodied person. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s great because it treats the disability as a disability and not a quick plot twist.

Authors, editors, this invites you to push yourself and your creativity. Find new ways for the hero/main character to triumph. Work with the character’s disability, be it existing before the book opens or something that happens along the way. Adapt the plot so the character doesn’t magically heal in ways that leave other disabled readers longing for the same thing to happen in their lives.

For many of us, there won’t be a magic bullet to restore our health. We can’t magically regrow limbs, we can’t have our eyesight restored, our pancreas doesn’t magically begin helping digest food, our blood pressure doesn’t mysteriously doing things that leave us suddenly unconscious, we aren’t bedridden for days with migraines.

If you’re going to put disabilities into your plots, be sure you’re going to alter the plot to make space for your character’s limitations.

Don’t write an able-bodied plot for a disabled character. Don’t magically heal them; it’s not the kind gesture you think it is when your reader would love nothing more than for that to happen to them, but then reality smacks them in the face.

Disabilities are important to show in fiction, of course. Which is why it’s also important to not magically heal the disability. Instead, change the plot.

You just might get a better book for it.