Writing About Disability isn’t Pretty is it?

Having just started submitting my manuscript for Eugenica to literary agents I received a comment that made me ponder the wisdom of having four main characters all of whom are disabled; disability is not attractive!

I agree, it is not. And the fact is that some people have a problem in dealing with disabled people. In fact I used to work with someone who told me that they had a problem with disabled people, I informed them that they were right; they did have a problem! I do not have such a problem but then I am a disabled person myself so that would be pretty counterproductive anyway.

Long John Silver

Curiously literature is not bereft of characters that have some form of disability; in fact there are legions of them. Captain Long John Silver was a rogue who never let having only one leg get in his way. He is the sort of character that I like, a bit of a good guy and a bit of a rascal. He is objectionable in many ways but he has his redeeming features, unlike Shakespeare’s Richard the Third who is just all bitter and twisted, his bile being occasioned by the fictional hump and limp the Bard inflicted upon him.

Of course Richard is not alone, there is Captain Ahab also. Here is a man so bitter about being left disabled by a creature that he was trying to kill, the temerity of the whale to fight back, that he committed everything to gaining his revenge on Moby Dick. I was quite glad that the white whale won that encounter actually.

Capt Ahab

Then there are the Tiny Tim type characters. I really do not like them. Simpering, pitiable and pathetic. They are no more convincing than Shakespeare’s King Richard. I know, there are such people in the real world but I do not find them interesting. Besides, the truth is that even disabled people are more complex than that.

Disability is not the issue it is just the first impression. Inevitably when a reader begins to read Eugenica they are going to come upon my characters as disabled young people. This is inevitable because that is what they are but it is not the sum total of everything that they are. As the story progresses more and more of the characters is revealed, their hopes, fears, outlooks on life, abilities and also how they cope with being what they are; both able and disabled.

Antony Sher as Richard III

Let me illustrate them for you briefly. Grace has a missing left hand and right leg due to suffering a form of limb reduction whilst developing as a foetus. She has lived largely in isolation and is self-reliant as a result. Thomas is blind and black, a double burden for living in 1930’s Britain. He is also kind, brave and a gifted musician. Mary has Turner Syndrome but colours every day with a love of life expressed through singing, dancing and acting. Hector is losing the use of his legs but is a voracious consumer of knowledge. Neither of them has an ability that balances out their disability, all of them have abilities, just like everyone else, and a pronounced disability as well, unlike most other people.

It is somewhat saddening to learn that there will be those people who will look at the synopsis of Eugenica and discount it immediately because it has disabled people in it. Yes, disappointing, but not surprising. People do not limit their prejudices just to their choice of reading material after all. I have been on the receiving end of such prejudice many times in my life and I accept that it is part of the human condition. It is not an enviable trait and it can be challenged but it is there all the same.

Tiny Tim

If I have been successful in writing Eugenica then the reader should finish it thinking of Grace, Tom, Mary and Hector not as disabled people first but rather as admirable people who have disabilities. That is definitely one of my objectives in writing the book. How successful I have been will only be known later and that will depend upon how many people get to the end of Chapter One and choose to keep on reading.

I have finished the second part of the Sorrow song Trilogy!

Well, almost. The actual writing part is complete. I am now in the process of formatting the manuscript in Sigil, an epub file creator. I write using Microsoft’s Word, which I find to be an excellent word-processor, and as I use more than one computer to do this there are no compatibility issues. This did not seem to be a problem with regards to creating a digital version of the manuscript either. Certainly when I submitted my first novel, The War Wolf, it made its appearance on the Kindle in fine form.

A little later I received some comments from readers that suggested that I should include a who’s who of characters as there is rather a few of them, what with it being a historical fiction novel. I also decided to a do a bit of cleaning up of the text, just a few lines that I thought could have been better written. As a result I reviewed the manuscript in Word again and then submitted it to Kindle, exactly the same as I had done the first time around. The results were not the same, however.

Another reader commented in a review about the poor formatting so I decided to have a look for myself by downloading a copy onto my Nexus 7 tablet. Sure enough I encountered various annoying problems, missing words and some words substituted by meaningless characters.

I could understand how this would annoy a reader who had paid for the book but to be honest it really annoyed me as the author. Amazon keep 30% of my sales in payment and they also accept the responsibility for transferring my manuscript from Word into epub for the Kindle. Clearly they had not done a good job in this instance.

Now I could have gotten on my high horse and complained to Amazon, and maybe I should have, but other writers, when asked, offered a different point of view. Some were of the opinion that the manuscript is the writer’s sole responsibility and that it is just not good practice to rely on others to get the formatting right when transferring it to other mediums, such as the epub file format. I think that there is an element of truth in this. I would not go so far as some suggested in learning how to manipulate the code to ensure the cleanest possible transfer of the manuscript from one format to another simply because I do not have the time for it. Fine if you do, not to mention the capability to take on something that technical, but I have a full-time job, a wife, kids, and a football team to support. Time is my most precious commodity!

This is where a program like Sigil comes in. It allows the author to upload a word file, check the formatting, and then save it as an epub file. It does not take away the requirement to go through the text one line at a time to make sure that nothing has crept into the format or that anything has been changed, that labour intensive task remains. The key point is, however, that the interface is based on ‘what you see is what you get’. This makes spotting errors that much easier. Yes it is time consuming but at least this approach instils more confidence in the fact that the final product, the epub file of For Rapture of Ravens, will not only contain any formatting errors but also that when Amazon transfers it to their Kindle format they have less opportunity for introducing any of their own during the process.

My intention is to get this second instalment out by the end of this month. I really want to see this book out there as I think that it makes a worthwhile companion to the first, which I was ridiculously proud of when I first saw it available. That then leaves me with the third and final book to complete. It already exists in a skeleton form. I need to put a lot of flesh on those bones, however. I have learnt so much in writing the first two novels that I am keen to apply that new knowledge to the final of the series. There is a part of me that would like a little break from Saxon England, however. I have thoroughly enjoyed writing about 1066 and I will definitely be finishing the Sorrow Song Trilogy, but I have other literary interests as well. Recently I have begun work on an alternative history project. It is a very dark and disturbing subject within in British history based upon the premise of ‘what if things had gone this way instead of the way that they did?’ It also touches on a subject that is very important to me but that is all I am willing to say at the moment.

I do not want to end with For Rapture for Ravens pushed into the shadows as that would be a disservice to the book and to myself as its author. I am very proud to have completed it so if you are interested in learning what befalls Coenred, Mildryth, and the real historical characters of 1066 then please look out for the publication date, which should hopefully be much sooner than later.

Today I will mostly be working on my manuscript

I set myself a deadline for publishing my book on Kindle and guess what? It's approaching at an alarming rate now!

No point whinging about it, if there was never a deadline there would never be any books published and what a horrible world htat would be!

So today has been set aside to peruse the suggestions from a good friend who is giving the manuscript yet another review, he's come up with some great ideas already. Nothing major, like the introduction of a whole new character, just some clever observations on how to improve various scenes or on moving some of the paragraphs around to create better hooks to catch the reader with.

If you can get someone you trust to do this sort of thing for you then it is definitely worth the effort, although a little bit earlier in the day would be better - but that's entirely my fault!!

How far should accuracy go in literature?

When writing a book a certain degree of research is necessary. When writing a book in the genre of historical fiction an awful lot of research is necessary. The question is; how accurate should you be in your depiction of the facts that?

I have mentioned preciously that the author Bernard Cornwell once said that a writer should not let the facts get in the way of a good story. I have also mentioned that I agree with this statement. The point is that when you are writing story that is what you are writing; a piece of fiction. Not an academic study, not a treatise on a particular incident; you are writing fiction!

Of course if you want the readers of a particular genre to like what you write then there has to be a degree of accuracy in the facts as you present them. The actual percentage of accuracy is not written down anywhere, it is something that you have to figure out for yourself.

Does it really matter?

Let’s look briefly at two case studies. First Patrick O’Brian’s ‘Master and Commander’, a very popular book based on the exploits of a British Royal Navy captain’s adventures during the Napoleonic Wars.

O’Brian’s knowledge of the nautical culture of 19^th century ships was impressive and every page is full of technical references to ‘sheet’ and ‘yards’ and ‘beams’ etc. My knowledge is actually pretty limited, so when I came to read this book I quickly found myself thumbing to the back in the expectation of finding a lexicon of naval terms – only there wasn’t one. I found myself trying to figure out what each term meant; which slowed my reading down and ultimately left me feeling frustrated when I got to the end of the book.

It was okay having all this wonderful detail but the author had failed to consider that one or more of his readers might not have the knowledge that would have made it plain sailing. In this instance I found that the facts got in the way of the story.

Second; Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. A very popular technological thriller exploring the very original idea of cloning dinosaurs from preserved DNA.

Michael Crichton studied medicine and had a good background in science but his most famous book suffers from poor research. The Velociraptors that he wanted to use were actually too small to play the part but there was another dinosaur that fitted the role much better but it was called Deinonychus; Chricton simply used swapped them over but kept the name Velociraptor.

Another famous, or should that be ‘infamous’, oversight concerned the Tyrannosaurus Rex, which in novel is stated as having eye sight that responded to movement. Crichton had seen a paper from a young palaeontologist who had rushed his research into print claiming just this fact but it was later refuted by senior scientists. The idea suited Crichton’s story, however, so he left it in.

In contrast to Patrick O’Brian’s novel anyone without much prior knowledge of dinosaurs could read and enjoy Jurassic Park without any trouble whatsoever; the same cannot be said for anyone who did, however.

I think this illustrates what I mean about accuracy being a balancing act.

As a writer I think that there is an ethical obligation to get the core facts of your story right. Essentially, whatever you are writing about, almost irrespective of genre, should be accurate to the degree that the reader can have confidence in you knowing your stuff. That is not to say that every single reference, every statement by every character, every line you write, has to be dripping with authenticity, because that would turn your story into an academic tome. It would also mean that you would have to find some way of explaining to the uninitiated reader each and every esoteric term, which would slow the story down immensely. Also, I think the reader also has an obligation when commencing a book to be able to suspend their factual belief to a certain degree as well. A novel is not wrong just because it presents an event in a slightly different fashion to how historians present it, for example, it is just offering an alternative interpretation of the events in, hopefully, an interesting way. As long as they key facts remain unchanged, such as in my work on 1066 where none of the major events change in anyway but where the agents of certain actions, whether fictional or historical personages, might differ from those recorded.

In other words, what I am saying is that there is a need to respect those facts that are germane to your subject matter and there is an option to gently alter others so as to make your story all the more exciting, all the more readable, and all the more believable to your reader.