Writing about Deaf Characters

I'm a writer in the midst of drafting multiple projects: a middle grade novel, a YA novel, and a coming of age story for new adults. Yet I see myself getting stuck frequently with two issues that seem to arise every time I start a project that contains a d/Deaf character and uses American Sign Language (ASL).



What's holding me back?  While my goal is to write a story that happens to have a character who is d/Deaf, I find it a struggle to avoid the cliche "overcoming-all-odds" type that singles that particular character out from their cast mates. I'd like to avoid the ubiquitous "a story about a Deaf person who..." and go down the route of "it's a story about friendship and besting the snowplow guy while building the best snow fort ever" and only on page 10 do they find out that one of the two children is d/Deaf.

One particular book captures that style well - that of Steve Kluger's "My Most Excellent Year: A Novel of Love, Mary Poppins, and Fenway Park". In that story, there's a precocious six-years-old boy who shares his love of my favorite word - that of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Needless to say, I got my own copy of this YA novel after reading a library copy. Nowhere in the one-paragraph summary does it mention that one of the major players is d/Deaf.

But too many books that I see on the shelves are the type that portray the d/Deaf character as inferior, or something to be fixed, or worse, a stock character without depth aside from the "DEAF" label. The latter is especially true for authors that have little or no knowledge of deafness and the Deaf culture. Those types come off as especially annoying as I could cross out every "deaf" or "signed" and still, the story would not change.

Then there's the issue of recording sign language conversations....

How would one transcribe dialogue conducted in sign language? Formatting options vary from publication to publication, and none of them has yet been able to capture the realism of sign in the printed word. Why? While English is a 2-D linear language (oftentimes florid and verbose), sign language is a vertical and 3-D language. Imagine trying to capture a 3-D film into comic book format? Some of the grandeur would be lost in the translation.

In "Of Sound Mind" by Jean Ferris, ASL is captured in bolded text. Doing so might suggest that the bolded text attracts the reader's attention, just as in real life, people are captivated by sign language happening around them - they are more apt to notice flying hands. Hence the bold print.

What about a story where language is a central theme? How can we capture the differences between Signed English and ASL? I have attempted to do this with a short memoir I shared a few months ago about parent-child language acquisition, which can be read here. I also wrote a piece on speech and language therapy, which also explored the challenges of translating someone's attempts at producing understandable spoken speech - read that one here.

Many books with a central d/Deaf character uses the traditional format for sign language and other dialogue in foreign languages by italicizing the text. The signs themselves are translated into English as well, thus losing the linguistic elements. Doing so suggests that the book could have been written about any character, Deaf or not.

How can we write a story without going down the Deaf-centric route akin to the inspirational "overcome-all-odds" fiction type and instead, go down the route where it's a story that just happens to have a character that is d/Deaf but the deafness is not the pivotal point of the story? What's the most effective way of transcribing sign into the printed word? Now, that's a story I would love to read.

Fellow writers, what are your thoughts? Readers, care to throw in your two cents?