Being an inclusive author is always a great thing. The diversity will make your book(s) more interesting and engaging for your audience, and a lot more people will be able to relate to your characters. That is if you portray them properly.
In this new blog series I aim to focus on portraying certain characters in books. Of course, I’m not a professional yet, and you should take everything I say with a bit of salt. Definitely don’t refer to my blogs alone, do your own research!
This blog will be about portraying blind characters, since I am working with that, thus allowing me to share my experience with you. I hope you’ll enjoy.
The concept of not seeing anything is quite foreign to people who aren’t blind. It’s not like having your eyes closed all the time; you don’t stare into a black void, you see nothing. The first step in portraying anything properly is knowing and understanding what it’s like. If you wanted to know what it’s like to be blind, you might spend your Sunday with a blindfold on, even though that’s not exactly what it’s like, it’ll at least help you understand.
You also need to know what it’s like inside their head, in other words, how do they think and dream? For blindness it depends on if someone was born blind or if they had gone blind. You might blur the lines a bit in a fantasy or sci-fi story but I do encourage you to do your research and portray it properly.
For people who have gone blind
People who have gone blind used to be able to see, that’s why their dreams and thoughts may still show imagery. While they still see nothing, it’s possible for them to imagine things visually and thus still “see” in a way. A big difference is that for people who have gone blind their visual memory is still very much present, so instead of relying on muscle memory, they can envision what it was like. For instance picture a remote, someone who was born blind might have learned where the volume button is through touch, someone who has gone blind will know that because they can still see the remote in their minds.
For people who were born blind
People who were born blind have never had sight, it sounds mind numbingly obvious but it’s hard to grasp for most seeing eye people. A person who is blind sees nothing, not black, just nothing. Therefore their dreams and thoughts don’t rely on imagery. They do certainly have dreams, but instead of relying on “sight”, they rely on their other senses. Throughout their life they have learned to rely on their smell, taste, hearing, and touch, this can sometimes result in an improvement of (one of) the senses. Sometimes called superhuman. This is most likely due to the brain and the body being able to form stronger bonds, though my research remains unclear.
While blind people can not see they are still spatially aware, all other senses still serve to give them a sense of the room or environment they are in.
Of course there is a lot more to it then what I have written down, but I think that this will suffice for now. Again, don’t refer to my blogs alone, research anything you write about.
I hope this has been somewhat helpful and if I have made any mistakes, let me know.
Happy reading and writing everyone!
Comments (9)
Do you look some of this up before blogging? There's a lot of stuff people don't usually know
Research is always very important
I Go Balls Deep into the Esoteric and Mysticism and the Mythology.
Ok
I definitely enjoy blogs related to diversity in stories! This was helpful in many ways and has encouraged me to portray different kinds of characters. I hope to see more blogs like this in the future!! ^–^
Thank you I hope to write more blogs like this in the future
Very interesting! I need to work on including more diversity in my stories so this was helpful!
Fantastic blog! The info you gave was very helpful. I'm always very adamant on portraying diverse characters the right way and love reading these types of blogs :)