kestrell

In any piece of fiction or nonfiction which discusses blindness, one can typically classify the representations of blind people into one of three categories:

magical blind people, metaphorical blind people, and real blind people.

Real blind people are those who seem the most like, well, "real" people. With the exception of possessing a visual impairment, they are pretty normal: they have jobs and hobbies, relationships and communities. This classification doesn't require a lot of description, however, because the Blinkus Normalus is a rare bird (indeed, many experts claim that it is purely a creature of myth) and it is almost never found in media representations. Plus, from a strictly story mechanics perspective, Blinkus Normalus are boring, and if one really wishes one's work to be discussed around watercoolers everywhere (not to mention win literary prizes), one would do well to ignore entirely the Blinkus Normalus.

A much more well-populated classification of blind people is that of
Magical blind people, or Blinkus Awe-somous. This group includes those blind people who possess disability superpowers
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DisabilitySuperpower
such as "second sight" (the almost infinite possibilities of puns and wordplays which arise from "sight" and "vision" remains a wellspring for the disability superpowers of the Blinkus Awe-somous) or the ability to move through a busy metropolis using only echolocation. The "magic" can have a pseudo-scientific or technological basis, as in the case of Jordie LaForge's headband-cum-prosthetic which allows him to see everything. As a matter of fact, whether the explanation given is a pseudo-religious one or a pseudo-scientific one, in portraying the Blinkus Awe-somous the author should be certain to pile on the miraculous language.

Ultimately, the Blinkus Awe-somous can not only bring home the bacon and fry it up in the pan, s/he can butcher her own free-range pigs and forge her/his own cast iron pan.

The most common class of blind person by far, however, are those belonging to the group of
Metaphorical blind people, or Blinkus Metaphorus.
Note to authors and other creative artists!!! One can produce no work of art or journalistic writing more guaranteed to make one's work the darling of The New York Times and other refined arbiters of taste than to insert some metaphorical blind people. There is no sentimental scene too sloppy, no leap of logic too tenuous, no metaphor too shaky for the metaphorical blind person!

In case one thinks one is not familiar with the Blinkus Metaphoricus, I can only say, pish-posh! Over-familiarity has merely rendered one blind to the plethora of its many forms. However, in order to ensure completeness of this guide, I will say that one may recognize the Blinkus Metaphoricus as those blind people who help a writer sustain a metaphor or prolonged allegory. Really, the Blinkus Metaphoricus could be thought of as an author's best friend, making sure that any narrative, no matter how patchy or uneven in texture or tone, is kept firmly stitched together through the repetition (like so many magical stitches!) of the many metaphors for which blindness can be made to serve. The possibilities are only limited by the author's imagination! And have no fear that one might make blindness mean madness in one paragraph and irrationality in the next and then death in the one after that--blindness is a cypher, so a writer should feel free to use it to mean anything or nothing. Remember, metaphorical blind people are like literary brownies which can be made to accomplish any narrative task!

But wait, you might be saying, shouldn't I worry about how I am portraying blind people?

Answer: Of course not! You are not basing any of your story on *real* blind people (if such a creature even exists, which is dubious, and we certainly have no evidence of such a creature in the vast history of literature), you are creating *metaphorical* blind people, and thus no one could possibly conflate or confuse the two. They are entirely different beings. That is, given the unlikely possibility that real blind people even exist. And even if they did, it isn't as if they read books, so how would they even know about your story, let alone feel offended by the representation of your metaphorical blind people? And even if they were, they should really lighten up (although of course it is probably difficult for creatures which live in perpetual darkness to truly understand what "lighten up" or "light" really means). But after all, your work is art, it has real significance! What counts the dignity or self-image of a few overly-emotional blind people when your work speaks to the great sensitivity and compassion you feel towards all those countless suffering individuals whose story really needs to be told? Plus, whenever things get too serious, you can throw in a scene of blind people stumbling around and tripping over each other--that never gets old.

...

Okay, now I need to go find the mental equivalent of a toilet brush so I can clean out the inside of my brain.