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Photo: We need more stories about disability in fiction. (Thinkstock) By Robert Hoge http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-19/hoge-how-literature-portrays-disability/4963110 Around one-fifth of the population has some form of disability, but rarely does it feature in literature. We must encourage storytellers to engage with themes about disability. It's time to tear down that wall, writes Robert Hoge. I left my heart to the sappers round Khe Sanh And my soul was sold with my cigarettes to the black market man I had the Vietnam cold turkey from the ocean to the Silver City And it's only other vets could understand. Don Walker, who founded Cold Chisel and wrote many of the band's most memorable songs, never fought in Vietnam. He was never conscripted and didn't volunteer to serve in South East Asia. Still, he wrote Khe Sanh. I'm yet to hear anyone suggest this country's understanding of issues facing Vietnam veterans would be improved if Don Walker didn't have the audacity to write a song that included the line: "And it's only other vets could understand" despite never going to war. It's the same with stories about disability. We need more stories about disability in fiction. We need more characters with a disability in fiction. We need more writers to take more risks and tell more complex stories about disability. And those stories can and must be written by anyone who wants to tell them - disabled or not. Around one-fifth of the population has some form of disability. That's easy to spot in many of us - by the way we look or walk or talk - but much is invisible to an instant glance. Take a look at the fiction offered up on the shelves of most bookstores, though, and you might start to think the proportion is one-fiftieth, not one-fifth. The proportion of the cripple rainbow on display in fiction is so very narrow it may as well not even have been raining. It's easy to see why it doesn't happen more regularly. Often there's criticism of fiction writers engaging with disability - especially at a deep level - in their work, when they are not disabled themselves. How dare some who isn't Aspergic, or isn't legless, armless or sightless write a story about a character with those attributes? How can they write authentically about those issues? How can they ever know what we go through? This makes itself apparent from time-to-time via criticism of authors who do not have a disability but write about disabled characters. Sometimes this criticism is fair and well-meaning. Other times it's exclusionary and not well thought through. Often that criticism is delivered by people with a disability or their carers. Even when criticism is not direct, it seems there's an almost unspoken fear of some authors who do not have a disability, engaging with it in fiction for fear of stepping on someone's prosthetic toes. The perceived barriers to entry are so high that some authors may be scared off engaging with disability in the stories they choose to tell. It's time to tear down that wall. Video: Robert Hoge embraces ugliness in a world obsessed with beauty (ABC News) Authors who tell stories about disability can find themselves criticised for getting details wrong, for making assumptions about the impact a disability might have on a person, for daring to appropriate our pain for their fiction. I get that. But the only way to celebrate disability, to engage with it in a much broader, more positive way in fiction is for us to stop being gate-keepers. We don't need gate-keepers, we need gate-openers. We need ushers encouraging storytellers to engage with themes about disability; we need cheerleaders barracking for the kid in the wheelchair to get the girl; we need more writers dreaming with us, fighting alongside us and exposing the bits of us that are most raw. We need bad stories featuring disability; appalling, awful, dull, dumb, stories because that's the only way we're going to get the good ones. Criticise those bad stories, by all means, but let's get more writers telling more stories and, quite literally, take the good with the bad. There's no characteristic common to all people with a disability. There's nothing that unites people with a disability in a way that race and gender and sexuality have a positive commonality that can unite them. There's nothing that we can easily celebrate other than an identified distance from normal, and that often comes with a degree of negativity that means it's not worth celebrating. So what's left? What's left is asking writers of fiction to pry into every corner of disability, ask questions of it, poke it, prod it and tell our stories about being broken and beautiful. Robert Hoge is a Brisbane writer. His memoir, Ugly, tells of his life growing up disabled and disfigured, and suffering numerous bad haircuts along the way. Watch Australian Story's report on Hoge - 'In Your Face' - on iview. View his full profile here.