Inclusive Storytelling Quotes

Storytelling is always evolving, but if you allow people with new voices and perspectives to come in, you open audiences up to different walks of life.

I really connect to strong feminist writers that make their ideas accessible for the rest of the world.

I think any good literature, whether it's for children or for adults, will appeal to everybody. As far as children's literature goes, adults should be able to read it and enjoy it as much as a child would.

I was raised in Harlem. I never found a book that took place in Harlem. I never had a church like mine in a book. I never had people like the people I knew. People who could not find their lives in books and celebrated felt bad about themselves. I needed to write to include the lives of these young people.

If outsider perspectives made 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Dark Knight' into fantastic franchises, imagine what would happen if you brought in the perspectives of women and people of color.

Media gatekeepers - editors, publishers, film studios and the like - need to begin investing in talent behind the scenes, developing and resourcing marginalized voices to tell their own stories. At the end of the day, it's about the story and what will enable the audience to truly see, understand, and know the life and times of the subject.

My husband [Julius Tennon] and I started a production company. We've already optioned a book and some scripts to do exactly that, to create more complicated, multi-faceted roles for African-Americans, especially African-American females. I think it's important.

I think as more women are in positions of power, more people of color are in positions of power, the stories become more inclusive; the casts become more inclusive.

It's my mission in life to put people on the screen who don't get normally represented.

What I'm really excited for is to see the evolution of trans characters and see more diverse stories be told, so that every time we're on screen, we're not really playing the part of educator and having to explain the experience to the audience, because it will have already been normalized.

It's a mistake to just go make a movie where the whole thing is talking down to the kids like, "Ok, we gotta bring the IQ of this movie down because it's a kids movie" You don't have to do that, kids can laugh and parents can laugh at different parts and that's fun, and you see that with all of the great kids movies.

I think if you look at Hollywood as a whole and the type of content that they put out over the years, it's pretty homogeneous, right? They haven't done a really deep dive into a lot of stories of people of color. I don't want to say that there haven't been attempts, and there has been some great product that has come out over the years, but I think in 2016, we're in a world of struggle. It's not just about race, it's also about the LGBT community too and others.

I cannot imagine where we would have been without BET. Many like me who operate in black America can only get our balanced story told nationally on BET talk shows.

When people say to me, 'Why are you so good at writing at women?' I say, 'Why isn't everybody?' Obviously there are differences between men and women - that's what makes it all fun. But we're all people. There's a lot of good writers who are very humanist, but still manage to kind of skip fifty-five per cent of the race. And I just don't get that. Not to be able to write an entire gender? To me, the question isn't how do you do it? It's how can you possibly avoid doing it?

We've all seen lots of stories about a young protagonist having adventures, and usually they're all boys, [and] there is sometimes a token female, or two.

We have to stop thinking about diversity and start thinking about inclusion. That's what you can take from August Wilson. That there are whole cultures out there living experiences exactly like yours, and their stories can be just as dynamic, sold in the foreign market, put as many butts in the seats as any Caucasian movie out there.

I feel lucky that Viceland wanted to make it, and I'm producing more than one film with LGBT characters and stories and it's because it's what I'm interested in. I'm not going to read a script and say, 'They're not gay, I'm not going to do it,' but I am interested in playing more gay people, because I've only played one gay person, and I've done a fair amount of movies, and I am interested in those stories. So for me, there's no should-I-or-shouldn't-I. It all feels natural.

I tell people, "It's the hardest thing to explain, but it's the easiest thing to understand." And all anybody really needs to know is, the struggles of life, the joy of life, the excitement and the heartbreak of life is something we can all connect to. And I like to hope that the inclusivity of the show [This Is Us] is something that audiences will relate to.

That's what I loved about 'Community' - we had one of the most diverse casts on TV, but we didn't emphasize culture. And yet, we also didn't run away from it.

I am optimistic. I think that there are a lot of women producing things, not necessarily in the studios. Actresses are putting stuff together. I think there are more stories about women of color [and] older women. But it is slim pickings.

Creatively, I just like interesting characters. So straight, gay, or whatever - like, whatever, wherever the characters are coming from or their lifestyle.

Literature should not be exclusive, it should be inclusive. My general view is that you can't, based on your own experience, project what a book will do for someone else. That's why I don't review books.

A novel can educate to some extent, but first a novel has to entertain. That's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page. I have a commitment to accessibility. I believe in plot. I want an English professor to understand the symbolism while at the same time I want the people I grew up with - who may not often read anything but the Sears catalog - to read my books.

Any time someone doesn't like one on the first run, I hope they will give it another shot. At least we'll get another chance. But I do feel, in my approach, I am not really a minimalist. I don't like to leave out ideas that I think could add something to the story. Sometimes, you can't quite pick up on all of it in one sitting. It's not by design. But maybe it's a side effect of my approach.

Is there deeply embedded change within our industry? And I would say, as a black filmmaker, it's easy for me to focus my attention on black work, but true change would include brown work, and it would include work by Asian-Americans, and it would include natives, and it would include women, and it would include more LGBTQ voices.