(no subject)

[chordatesrock]

I do know that accessportrayal is my community and I can make arbitrary decisions about it if I want to, but since the access_fandom crowd is a big chunk of potential membership, I feel like asking opinions. I've been considering adding my own article, not about a specific disability, but about disabilities that magically go away, because I've had this happen to me and putting those experiences into words could be useful for writers who choose (against all attempts to persuade them otherwise) to go that route with their characters. Do you think that's a good idea (especially for fanfic writers who have no choice) or will it just encourage more of this kind of plot twist?

Comments

Re: Well...

[chordatesrock]

That's a very good point that I hadn't considered. I'll have to add writing that addresses what is done, and what could be done, with this in fiction.

Re: Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Back when I ran PanGaia,
we had a debate column called
"Toe to Toe" where we'd set a
topic and then try to get at
least one essay for either side.
It worked, it made people think,
it generated a lot of letters.
Other times, we'd get opposed
essays spontaneously, or we'd
get one and ask if anybody
wanted to write a counterpoint.

Feel free to borrow any of that
which you think might be useful.

There are a lot of tropes and
techniques that people fight
over in fandom. As a literary
scholar, I find analysis more
useful than rants. And as a
reader, well, fandom!wank is
never fun. Try to avoid that.
In a community such as you're
running, it's going to be an
ongoing challenge, just because
the broad subject of disability
is fraught with so much tension.

Re: Well...

[chordatesrock]

Thanks. :) That's a cool technique. Accessportrayal isn't meant for opinion pieces so much as sharing experience and knowledge, but it's a good technique to know anyway. By the way, how did you avoid wank on PanGaia? I don't have any wank yet, partly because of how few contributors I have so far, but you're right, it could happen.

Re: Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>Accessportrayal isn't meant for opinion pieces so much as sharing experience and knowledge, but it's a good technique to know anyway.<<

I think you're going to find that
once you go beyond medical or
technological facts, you'll get
opinion pieces as folks discuss
their experiences or things
they've seen. Different people
will solve the same problems in
different ways, or interpret
things differently.

>> By the way, how did you avoid wank on PanGaia? I don't have any wank yet, partly because of how few contributors I have so far, but you're right, it could happen.<<

It was a magazine, so I used a
combination of editing (i.e.
not publishing things with
logical fallacies in them) and
developing a pool of reliable
writers.

See also my recommendations
for online communities:
http://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/571551.html

Re: Well...

[chordatesrock]

Thank you very much for that warning and for the link. :)