Someone Else's Trash

Last week, I read a m/m romance. In this book, a hair stylist falls for one of his customers, a wheelchair user in his first relationship since his accident ten years ago. I love stories like this. I not only read them, but I write them. A few of the books in my New Beginnings series have disabled characters so I’m always excited to read about them.

Only a few chapters into the book I was reading, I found myself rolling my eyes, but I kept going. The premise was strong and the potential to be great was there so I didn’t want to give up. The more I read the book, the less I liked it. Finishing the book became about seeing my investment of time through to the end as opposed to not being able to put it down.

So what was the problem?

The biggest issue for me was that everywhere this couple went, the wheelchair user was met with a form of discrimination. I am not kidding when I say every time they went out in public, some asshole was insulting or attacking the wheelchair user. And every time it happened, his able bodied boyfriend was there to save the day with a sharp word or threat to anyone who wronged his man. Let me tell you, it got grating. Instead of this book exploring the relationship between these two, it was more about the able bodied guy having to fight for his disabled boyfriend. 

Guess what? I wasn’t the only one who found this off-putting. Another reviewer gave the book the same rating I was going to, and her review was so lengthy, there was no way I couldn’t read it. In reading this review, I learned something about my own writing of disabled characters that I hadn’t even realized I was doing.

Like me, this reviewer was disgusted by the number of times the able bodied man has to swoop in and save the day for his disabled boyfriend, but our reasons were different. I felt like it happened far too often to be realistic. The other reviewer pointed out how ableist it was. Our able bodied character is determined to stand by his man, which is fine, but he’s always the first to speak up when the discrimination occurs. He doesn’t ask if his man needs or wants the help. He just jumps up to defend his man and then magnanimously points out that the discrimination isn’t happening on his watch. Not being disabled, I hadn’t considered this, but it makes sense that it would be annoying to assume someone wants or needs that type of defense.

I’ve written books with amputees and one with a wheelchair user. I’m currently working on one with a blind character. Reading that review made me wonder if I was guilty of what this writer had done. Going back through my current work in progress, I was dismayed to find two scenes exactly like this reviewer described. I did the insensitive waiter and the ignorant department store clerk shtick. In both scenes, my sighted character takes it upon herself to speak up before the blind man even has a chance to react.

As the reviewer of the other book pointed out, this isn’t intentional. When you’re not disabled, you don’t always have the right perspective to understand how insensitive and annoying that can be; how it has the opposite effect of what you were going for.

Thanks to a bad review on someone else’s book, I learned a few things to make me a better writer, including strategies to avoid being unintentionally ablest. One woman’s bad review turned out to be a treasure for me.