"How to write a blind character" guide?

[steorran_worulde]

Hi,
This post may be stretching the boundaries of this community, since it's not exactly about fandom, but:

trouble directed me here and suggested that people here might have links to things of the form "How to write characters with X disability". The thing I'm particularly investigating at the moment is blindness. I want to know what kinds of things blind people can do that sighted people might expect that they couldn't do, and what kinds of adaptations they make to do these things. I also want to know about what kinds of things blind people find difficult that a sighted person might not expect. And, more generally, I want to know what I should know about blindness and being blind that I might not even know to ask about.

The context in which I'll be putting this information to use is not for writing a blind character in a sighted society, but for designing a culture in which everyone is blind. Still, things aimed at helping authors write blind characters in sighted society will likely still be useful to me.

Comments

[steorran_worulde]

Thanks for the links - I haven't had a chance to read them yet, but I will.

Also, from a writer's perspective, I suggest that you abandon the entire concept of blindness in order to better create your milieu—if you work on the mental exercise long enough, you'll probably find it takes.
I'm not sure what you mean by that.

I have a close friend who was born without complete optic nerves and he is in no way "disabled". He just perceives things differently than those of us who use sight.
Certainly one of the things going on in this imaginary society is that being unable to see isn't a disability, because it's just normal. That's how life is. They haven't even had contact with sighted society for thousands of years, so are basically unaware that human vision exists.

The blindfold practice idea is a good one. I'll have to see if I can make time to try that.

[0jack]

I'm not sure what you mean by that.

Well, this is how I'd take a run at the concept you're working on. Blindness is a deeply ingrained concept in our paradigm, so is sight. We ascribe all kinds of values for those concepts. So when you consider your creation (if you consider anything for a while, really), try and throw out the whole idea as a mental exercise. Don't even use the terms for a while and see how your perspective shifts. When you come across things like "he has great vision", disengage the concept of "vision" from the aspect that applies to using one's eyes. Then, what if you kept the concept of "seeing" and applied it to other input? Most of us can't imagine telling someone without sight to "look" at something, but what does "looking" become when vision has never existed?

There are all kinds of ways you can go about getting into the headspace necessary to write this world, those are just some of the mental exercises I'd do in order to get the concepts down.

[redbird]

I'm not mac, obviously, and don't know what zie meant, but one difference is that a blind person in our society is dealing with a society set up on the assumption that most people can see. In a society where nobody has ever had vision, that wouldn't be the case. For example, there wouldn't be a transport system that relied on large numbers of sighted people to operate vehicles, and risked the lives of people who couldn't see them. (Think carefully about your transport infrastructure, and remember that transport includes food.)