residentofthedisc asked:
Hi, Mr Gaiman. I hope you're alright. Probably a bad question, but I'm hard-of-hearing and autistic so I started writing a fantasy about a HoH autistic aeronaut, but now I feel guilty about writing a character similar to me. It feels like cheating that I'm not being more creative and branching out. Is this right?
Years ago, when most of what I was doing was in comics, Stephen King told me I should write a book where the lead character worked in comics. And I rejected the idea because it seemed unimaginative and people wouldn’t be interested. And a year or so later King published Cell, in which the lead is a comics artist. And I read it and thought, oh but if you were telling a story with a comics artist in you could have done X, Y and Z…
One reason people like to read books is to see outside their own experience. And I’ve never read any books with Hard of Hearing and Austistic lead characters. It sounds like you can take people somewhere they haven’t been before. So don’t be scared to take them with you.