Characters and narrative: Beware the lure of the tidy narrative arc

Perhaps the most important question we ask before we start a story is this: Who is the main character? In other words, whom is the story really about? Who is making the change, and who is affected by the change? I will explore the subject of sources in greater depth in the Sources section, but for now, let’s consider that one of the first things a journalism student learns is that a story must consist of people doing something for a reason. The sources who become your characters must be active. They must be working to bring about some change, organizing some kind of action, or doing something unique. In order to make the narrative compelling, they must have reasons for doing what they do. When we look for story ideas, we are also hunting for characters — specifically, for protagonists, the people making the story happen. As journalists, our discussions with editors often include questions about whether a source is the right voice to tell the story. If the source is not that right person, we discuss how we can find that right person.

But there’s a major problem. We as a society, and we as journalists, are not used to seeing disabled people as main characters, nor to seeing main characters as disabled. We are used to seeing disabled people as people who are acted upon, not as actors. This is, I believe, part of the reason the “overcoming disability” frame is so popular. We don’t think of disabled people as doing things, so if a disabled person does anything, they have to “overcome” disability to do it — or not be disabled at all. By this, I don’t mean that they are considered to be faking it, although that can be its own problem, but that their disability is made not to count as such, perhaps not even in their own mind. There are many disability and illness memoirs in which people say they did not identify as disabled for a long time, often because, unlike people they thought of as “truly disabled,” they could still do things. They could still act in the world. But through joining a community of other disabled people, they eventually learned that claiming the identity of disabled or ill does not mean giving up agency. They integrate the identity of disability in their identity.

 
The media at large has not gone through a similar integration process. We in the media want our “people doing something for a reason.” We want our protagonists. We want our narrative arcs with their tidy endings.

 
So, when we think of the main character of a disability story, we think, perhaps, of a loving mother trying to get her disabled child treatment or a loving spouse advocating for their partner’s care. We think of scientists working day and night to find the cure.
We may miss that the mother got her child treatment that gave the disabled child post-traumatic stress disorder or that, in fact, the disabled partner wants a divorce and doesn’t want their non-disabled spouse anywhere near their group home. And we might miss that the disabled person doesn’t want a cure, especially if a cure would mean that no one else like them would ever be born.

 
In other words, we may miss that the disabled person in the story is active, doing something for a reason and the centre of their own compelling story.

That’s not to say there aren’t heroic parents, loving spouses or brilliant scientists, but as reporters, our job is to ask questions — and, sometimes, our failure to do that makes us miss the protagonists who were there all along.

Another thing that can cause trouble is that many disability stories don’t have clear antagonists or even an “other side” that we can use to bring “balance” to our coverage, the way Anakin Skywalker supposedly did to the Force. I don’t mean that disability issues present no disagreements and no controversies; instead, I mean that media can and often do report such issues as less nuanced than they actually are. For examples, see virtually any media coverage of “a cure” for any disability whatsoever. Much of the coverage is written according to this formula:

• Some people are fighting for a cure for disability X. But others don’t want it to be cured because they think acceptance is the answer.

The situation is virtually always more nuanced than that (see Language).

Another problem journalists can run into is the lack of an end for a narrative arc, the absence of either triumph or tragedy. Many disabled people’s lives are ones of keeping on keeping on, living with illness or disability rather than being cured or dying. And often, help is not on the way: services remain chronically underfunded, and treatments unavailable. I, and many other disabled journalists I’ve talked to, have had pitches rejected (and I’ve rejected some myself) because “there’s no story there” or “this is a topic, not a story.” The argument is that nothing has changed, or is likely to change soon, for the sources we’re writing about, so why should our audience care? This can create a vicious cycle: the accountability that would require change is often generated by public interest, which, in turn, is generated by media coverage. But the way we journalists structure our coverage makes it harder to get sustained media attention.

Sometimes, the evergreen nature of much disability coverage can come with its own advantages. Peter Catapano, the creator of the Disability series in the New York Times, said that, when he chose the subject, he was “mindful of Ezra Pound’s definition of literature: news that stays news.”[1] Journalists have used the ongoing nature of disability struggles to great effect, often in longer pieces or personal memoir. But the quick nature of the daily news grind makes this harder to do, especially when it comes to tackling how things change over time. Disabled people often complain about media missing stories that have been right in front of our faces for years. The desire for the latest news and the most relevant and novel stories can lead to reporters not tuning in until a story is too big to ignore. Living by the hoary maxim “If it bleeds, it leads” can mean you miss the death by a thousand cuts.
It can also mean that we journalists and other media professionals miss the happiness of disabled life; for disabled life, like any other, has its mix of joys, sorrows, banality, wonder and tragedy. “Overcoming disability” is not, by definition, necessary for happiness — being treated as a person of worth and dignity is. If all the media covers is tragedy and suffering with an occasional “inspirational story” about “overcoming disability,” that’s all the public will know. And the public includes disabled people, some of whom might not be willing to claim the label, because all they know of it is tragedy.