Kody Keplinger

This series is a fascinating look at how a writer can acknowledge the “magical cure” trope and improve on the portrayal in later books.

Audiobooks are an essential part of making reading as accessible as possible, so we’re excited to sit down with marketing manager Jennifer Rubins and head of production Dan Zitt and talk about the behind-the-scenes process of audiobooks.

Eric Lindstrom wrote an excellent portrayal of a blind teenage girl, so we’re happy to invite him to the site to discuss his approach, blindness tropes, and more.

Parker Grant is a complex, flawed character whose blindness was handled realistically; a big part of her life, but not the only part of her life. This is definitely a book I will be recommending.

Writing about characters with mental illness can be challenging in various ways. How do you accurately convey a character’s state of mind, without compromising on clarity or excitement? How do you show a character’s skewed perceptions of the world?

Don’t Touch is an insightful look into the life of a girl with OCD, and we were delighted to interview author Rachel M. Wilson about this wonderful debut.

Diversity in children’s literature is often represented as an either/or, without intersectionality; characters can either be autistic or gay, for example, or a wheelchair user or Black, but rarely both. Why is that?

Clichés, ableist language … what kinds of words, phrases, or situations used in book or character descriptions send up warning flags for our contributors?

April Henry’s main character in Girl, Stolen is a well-researched, well-written example of blindness, and we were thrilled to discuss the book with her.

If our contributors could tell an author writing a character with their disability one thing – besides “do your research” – what would it be?

What’s so wrong with the Beautiful Tragedy trope? Why is it wrong to emphasize the supposed irony of a person with beautiful eyes who can’t see or a good-looking person “confined to a wheelchair” (another horrible, tragedy evoking phrase) or the like?

Blind characters seem to always go too far in either one direction or the other—either completely ruled by their disability, or completely unfazed. The truth is, I hate both, because neither is honest.

The notion of people faking disabilities is not at all new or novel–and, like many, many disability tropes, it’s a harmful one.

Which are our contributors’ least favorite disability tropes?

A mistake I see a lot of writers who write about disability make is asking only one person for help. I’ve heard so many people say things like, “I have a cousin who is blind, and she read the book and said it was good at portraying blindness.”

What kind of tips do our contributors have for authors seeking to respectfully write disabled characters?

That’s the thing about disability, I think. You’re a normal person, you experience normal things, and then, every once in a while, you hit that wall. That reminder that you aren’t quite like the majority of your peers.

How do our contributors define the dreaded concept of “inspiration porn,” and how do they feel about it?