Re: writers born blind
Hi Nin.
Hellen Cheller is quite specific to disability, rather than writing fiction. I have encountered a couple of blind academics writing on the field, and even at one stage heard about a 19th century Blind professor of architecture at oxford, however in terms of general fiction, while there are people like John Milton who went blind later, I've not specifically heard of those born blind. Braille might in fact be part of this problem, sinse while braille allows reading and writing, it only allows writing in braille and not many none blind people can read braille. Hellen Cheller got celebrity status for her being deaf and blind, but it was very much a cult of curiosity.
Now however, the writing problem is no longer an issue sinse blind people can write electronically and communicate equally with everyone, a more critical problem is how to write in such a way as to be convincing as an omniscient narrator when you have a sense o f light, colour and appearence missing and do not, (as a person with limited vision does), have any vague ideas to build associations on.
There are several options. First, you could just try the thing borrowing from other authors. This is what I myself do in writing some details like facial expressions which i've never been able to ssee but which I associate with a general emotional mood, but whether you could do this with All! visual information and be convincing I'm not sure. I'm not saying it's impossible, I admit I don't know, only that it is a concern.
Second, you could just hang the visual information and write books from the perspective of a blind person. This would have restrictions. You couldn't for example describe long peaces of action particularly easy unless your blind character was getting a second hand account from someone else. So if you were describing a battle your blind character would just be in the center of sound and no ise. This might be interesting to read and while most sighted people would regard itas an anomaly at the same time it could become recognized as such, sinse after all most sighted people do not know what it is like to be blind. The other concern with writing that sort of thing is risking falling into the trap of writing "blind!" books, ie, books who's main subject is blindness which are focused only on it, and which don't attempt to tell a good story.
I'd be interested to see books with a blind character perspective where the fact that she/he was blind was just incidental to her/hhis plot and the character, rather than being the main focus as it usually is on the few occasions blind characters are portrayed in film or literature.
The third option is to write in a medium where visual description does not matter, ie, audio dramas or play scripts.
I'm not sure which of these is the best idea for you, I'm just thinking of pos sibilities. Personally i love the language of visual description, colours and light and atmosphere, but then again I have the advantage of having working vision, indeed I love! colours myself.
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