Deafness - Blog Posts

minhosbitterriver

1 year ago

As a Deaf person, I appreciate this person’s want to offer some form of representation of the Deaf community despite them being hearing themself. However, I don’t believe it’s correct to do so without having the most basic knowledge on the language we use to communicate. It’s easy to know when the author doesn’t know anything about the culture they’re trying to write. Like OP mentioned, it’s not to be fluent in sign language, but it’d be nice to actually delve into your character enough that you learn a little bit. Otherwise, this lack of investment makes the Deaf reader feel very used and/or like you didn’t really bother getting to know us as a community to begin with — a feeling we know all too well. We’re so much more than what people think, I guarantee you’ll be surprised.

Something I think could be helpful is to ask yourself why you want to write a Deaf character?

Anyway, I wish you and anyone else who wants to write Deaf characters well.

I have a question, if it's not too much of a bother. I'm a hearing writer who describes tones and voices more than anything, maybe. I have a character who is deafened near the end of my story and learns sign language to communicate. I've read posts saying that instead of describing a loud voice, for example, I should talk about exaggerated movements in sign. Now, I don't understand sign (the particular character learns BSL). How do I do the description anyway? Thanks, Luna 💛

Hi! I answered this ages ago but Tumblr is a piece of shit and didn’t upload the answer (•ˋ _ ˊ•) But anyhow, take two:

Don’t worry about the description until you’re ready to edit your manuscript over with a fine tooth comb, or you’ll never get anything written. Being a hearing writer, you’ll be used to sounds, and that’s okay! I’ll come back to the actual craft in a moment, but before I do, your ask has a few points in that I’d like to address.

Firstly, make sure you understand at least some sign. I’m not saying that you need to learn to speak the language fluently or anything, but it would be awesome if you could do some research into the basics such as grammar and facial punctuation. Once you’ve got those straight in your head, it ought to be easier to describe the signed dialogue in a more natural way.

Secondly, I highly doubt your character is 100% Deaf. That is incredibly rare. It’s more likely that your character will have a limited amount of residual hearing–ie, they can hear noises that are low-pitched and high-volume, but the sound is “murky” or unclear. So while some background sounds could filter through to them, others wouldn’t even register. Whether they can hear human speech or not depends on the levels of hearing loss. (I talk a bit about the levels of Deafness in this post; you should do some further research yourself)

As for the craft itself, here’s the method I use for editing:

Find all of the instances where you’ve described a sound and highlight them (either by hand or with something like Word’s highlighter tool)

You could also use the Find or Search tool to hunt down any sound descriptors by searching for hearing buzzwords like heard, sound, loud, quiet, noise etc

Some of these descriptions won’t even be necessary, which is a normal part of editing whether you’re writing a Deaf character or not

But once you’ve found the necessary descriptors, see if there is something that they can be replaced with

For example, instead of “The leaves on the trees whispered in the wind” you could write about the source of the sound: “She could see the tree branches shiver in the rising wind out of the corner of her eye.”

Or maybe focus on another sense–there are four left, after all!

Sight, taste, smell and touch will all be compensating for the lack of sound. Use them.

It’ll take some re-training, but you’ll get there eventually. Practise and experimenting is key

And for dialogue, here is a list of what you’ll want to be taking note of:

facial expressions

body language

proxemics (ie, does one character move nearer to the other or away?)

tics or non-sign actions (fiddling with clothes, tugging hair, shifting weight from foot to foot etc)

Hope this helps!