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A brief list of recommendations our contributors put together.

In my experience, the disabled sibling in fiction exists purely to make the main character’s life more “difficult,” more “sympathetic.” Oh, that poor dear, the writers want you to think, having to deal with such a horrible thing. It must be so hard.

According to pop culture, mentally ill people are magically more creative, filled with a manic drive to create art that pushes them to the brink until they finally explode.

Did you know in the US it’s illegal to drive within six months after having a seizure? Even under supervision, even just around the block, I wasn’t trusted behind a wheel.

Predictably, many of the tropes relating to D/deaf and hard of hearing characters deal with communication methods and degree of hearing loss. Most, if not all, of these tropes have to do with people’s assumptions and wishful thinking about hearing loss.

Ever seen the Allstate commercial?  “I’m a random windstorm. Shaky, shaky.” Well, sometimes that’s how life feels when you’re a kid with disabilities.  Because I’m both very random and my life can be, well, pretty shaky.

We’ve decided to continue Disability in Kidlit as an ongoing blog rather than a one-time event!

The best part about this story being told as a graphic novel how Gulledge shows us Will’s anxiety: we can literally see the shadows and worries that plague Will.

Which are our contributors’ least favorite disability tropes?

ADD isn’t an end of the world big deal. It’s really, really not. But it is a deal, it’s a thing. It’s a disability. It puts you on a different default setting.

I’ve always wondered what it would’ve looked like to the outside world, this dance of ours. (Would we be pitied?)

Among Others is a terrific book, even if it isn’t perfect, and I’m so glad Walton represented a disabled teen girl as interesting, strong, and unique.

The story suggests that Kira’s talents as a threader make up for her disability, justifying her continued survival — with the disturbing implication that without it, she would be worthless.

Perhaps “normal” behavior is best described as a “normative spectrum.”

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.”

In terms of disabled characters, what would our contributors like to see more of in children’s literature?

I regularly recommend One-Handed Catch as the best book for young people about limb deficiency because it captures two big aspects of life with one fewer limb: humor and problem solving.

I’ve never written fiction about living with Crohn’s, and to be honest, I’ve never wanted to. Perhaps because I still feel what I felt for years growing up: that nobody wants to hear about my annoying, humiliating misery. Yet I know, intellectually, that this is a shame, because there should be more characters in YA literature who live with chronic illnesses like IBD.

Pete’s autism is portrayed over and over again as being non-stop pain and suffering. That got incredibly hard to read; do people really think this is what autism is like?

A snarky New York Times column referred to CFS as “yuppie flu,” and oh, it was hilarious. Those silly rich people imagining themselves sick!

The two or three months I managed to get by on the reduced dose were enough to convince me: My psychiatrist is lying. I don’t need medication. I’m fine. I can beat this. Until, of course, I couldn’t.

With one word, one look, it hit me that my experience really was abnormal.

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

The only way I can describe Take a Good Look by Jacqueline Wilson is a book designed to educate young children about visual impairment gone horribly wrong.