More blind characters in fiction would be great, especially as you seem willing to do your research first.

In no particular order, here are some suggestions:

1) Blind people do not get to know someone by feeling their face. This seems to show up in almost every media depiction of a blind person, but I’ve never heard of a real blind person wanting to feel faces.

2) Most blind people have some vision. Blindness covers vision of 20/200 (10%) or less of full sight, and that includes a wide range of vision and vision problems. So it’s a good idea to figure out what eye condition your character has, and research what people with that particular condition see.

3) Blindness isn’t the end of the world and blind people can live just as full and fulfilling lives as our sighted peers. We are not all desperate to be cured, though many of us would like that. My point is, the story doesn’t have to end with the character‘a blindness being fixed to be a happy ending. There are so many sighted people who assume I must be depressed and desperate for full sight, and I’m really, really not.

4) For any activity your character does, don’t immediately assume they can’t do that thing because they are blind. We adapt all sorts of things, or find ways around them. So it’s a good idea to do some research on “how blind people do X” to see if there’s a way we do it before deciding we can’t.

5) We don’t have super hearing or smell because our eyes don’t work. Rather, we learn to pay more attention to what our other senses are experiencing as we’re not getting that information by sight. For example, you can know when it’s safe to cross the street by listening to the traffic. Of course, sighted people hear the traffic as they’re crossing the road, too, but they aren’t paying attention to it in the same way.

It's a perfectly fine thing to do. All I'd say is that be aware, no matter how you write this character, someone somewhere will probably have a problem with it. If it helps, blind people argue among themselves as to what proper behaviour is so you probably don't have much chance of somehow managing to write a character that doesn't annoy anyone.

Exactly how your character behaves will depend a lot on what that person's background is. Were they born blind, did they go blind somehow, and how long ago was that. What do they do for a living, what sort of circumstances do they live in, what sort of buddies do they have, what do they do for fun. In the story they'll have some sort of goal or something they're striving for, so what is that. All the normal stuff that would affect anyone with or without the disability. The best overall approach is to have this person behave exactly like everyone else, except where that's just obviously completely impossible, like with things like driving.

Watch a show called In the Dark (CW) , then do everything exactly the opposite of the way they wrote it. just kidding.

more seriously I am totally blind since birth, and if you reddit message me specific questions or story samples I would be happy to read it over and critique it with you. Also I studied English literature.

*I have no friends or family members who are blind*

Now you do! Nice to meet you =)

*firstly, this is even appropriate for me to do*

Only you can answer that. If you take it too far to one extreme you end up afraid to write anything except an autobiography. If you take it too far the other way you end up being celebrated by racists and shunned by the very community you tried to portray. It's generally best to stay away from either extreme.

*how can I approach this character?*

The same way you approach any fictional character.

*Is there anything I should know or any tropes about blind characters that I should avoid?*

Depends on what you're aiming for. If you want a realistic portrayal of a human being who's blind then lurk around r/Blind for a bit and see what we share with one another. If your character's blindness is a plot device then you probably want to focus more on how his blindness fits into the plot than how real blind people interact with the world.

The only trope I'd warn about is beware of making your character's blindness his personality. We are very much human beings. We want that new girl behind the deli counter to think we're cute. We want the line at the post office to move faster. We want the DJ to stop playing Christmas music before mid December. We want someone else to do the dishes. We want our kids' school bus to show up on time. We want to lose a few pounds. We want both sides to quit rioting and see the humanity in each other. We want Tom Petty back.

We're just as human as you, with all the same hopes, guilt, dreams, fantasies, and quirky rituals on Superbowl Sunday. Blindness doesn't define us.

I'd love to hear more about your story idea if you're comfortable sharing.

On the role of blindness in culture:

There Plant Eyes by M. Leona Godin

https://books.google.com/books/about/There_Plant_Eyes.html?id=Anv7DwAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description

Also, check out the Other Resources links here in the right side panel of tis subreddit.

If you're willing to invest a couple of hours to make your portrayal immeasurably less degrading than what we usually get, I can show you how not to do it in three essays and a pamphlet. They're not purely hatchet jobs, there is also discussion of the writers who did their research, exercised the tiniest sliver of empathy and somehow managed to create normal, fully-human blind characters. I would just add the proviso that all but one of these essays deal with fiction from the mid-to-late twentieth century and earlier, largely novels and plays written in English, I rarely read books about blind people so I don't know if there has been any improvement in the intervening decades.

* Sheri Wells-Jensen: $1 (2016)

* Deborah Kent: $1 (1988)

* Kenneth Jernigan: $1 (1974, I know the title sounds paranoid by today's standards but keep in mind that depictions back then were almost uniformly ignorant and condescending, more noxious than you or I will ever know! I wish he had expanded on the elusive "tenth theme" of ordinary blind people just livin' life [See Endnote #23], for that we can turn to either Kent above or…)

* Jacob Twersky: $1 (1955). Here I would like to draw your attention to the glowing terms with which he speaks of Wilkie Collins's Poor Miss Finch, a novel whose main character has the distinction of being "one of the most normal persons among the sightless characters in literature", he says this despite Collins's nonsensical little musings on how he imagines The Blind™ go about Their lives. We don't mind if you make small mistakes regarding our cane travel or computer use techniques, as a seeing writer it's basically inevitable since you don't have the lived experience to create a flawless narrative, what matters is that your blind character is generally treated with dignity and respect, as a regular person with human agency who can take care of themselves and understands the world around them.)