: Re: How to make a intellectually disabled character believable? I want to use a 12yo girl with down syndrome as main character. Trisomy 21 people has a low IQ, normally around 50, at least according

@Bryan361

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One of the most famous short novels ever written, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, has a mentally challenged character as one of its main characters. You certainly need to read this to help you understand an excellent way of treating a character of this type.

The hero of my own story, "Conditioning," which was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, is a mentally challenged adult. The story is not about his mental limitations, but about certain actions he takes that are a result of how he sees the world. In order to accomplish this, I had to put myself into his head, and imagine how I would respond to certain situations if there were some characteristics of those situations that simply were unrecognizable to me, and hence to him. (And that's really the fundamental basis of how you do what you need to do to write a character like that in a sympathetic way.)

Let's take a very, very, very crude example of this. Let's just say you imagine an alien creature who lands in the woods. He walks out of the woods and wants to get to a city to meet our political leaders. He comes to a highway, but has no understanding that automobiles carry people to cities. He says to himself, wow, those sure are interesting speedy animals, as he sees cars going by. And he walks past the highway and walks further into the woods without ever flagging down a car.

Obviously, the situations and circumstances in serious fiction are much more subtle, complicated, and sophisticated than this, by far. But in a context like this web site, I hope that the broad and overly simplistic example above can give you an idea of what the basic concept is. Good luck!

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