Inclusive Writing Quotes

Written by a woman automatically is better.

I am committed to writing appropriate books for the middle grades. This means no bad language, no gratuitous or explicit violence, and no sexual content beyond what you might find in a PG-rated movie – expressions of who likes whom, holding hands, and perhaps the occasional kiss. The idea that we should treat sexual orientation itself as an adults-only topic, however, is absurd. Non-heterosexual children exist. To pretend they do not, to fail to recognize that they have needs for support and validation like any child, would be bad teaching, bad writing, and bad citizenship.

It’s much better to be a tribal writer, writing for all people and reflecting many voices through us, than to be a cloistered being trying to find one peanut of truth in our own individual mind. Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.

In my mind, every single female character I've written is plus-size.

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?

I've never wanted to live in a ghetto or write in a ghetto. I want to write about a world that reflects the one most people live in. Gay people are just one aspect of that.

I don't like narrowing my readers down - there's not a particular age or gender or nationality. I suppose I'm aiming at the child I was.

I wanted to write for all children, even those kids who might see language as a threatening thing, even if English is their second language.

In my mind, I'm writing for everybody.

I write diverse books because the world we live in is diverse, and I want my books to reflect that truth.

I'd say it's never a challenge to present white and heteronormative privilege. The hard thing is to write any other way.

I think it's wrong to write in a totally esoteric language when you want to talk about things which interest a multitude of women.

If a song is being written for a woman, there should be a woman in the room collaborating.

It's really important to me to follow the kinds of conversations that happen around diversity and representation and writing inclusive books.

I'm not writing for fundamentalists. I'm writing for the people who have been repelled by that kind of thinking and yet who think there might be something they haven't yet discovered.

Far too often scripts are being written with race in mind, but the subject matter doesn't lend itself to any conversation on race. I applaud Jesse [Zwick] for having the courage to say, this [About Alex] just a story about friends, and they could be anyone. There's no specific color that forces a relationship to be discussed in any other manner.

The imaginative leap for me of writing for women is no more difficult than the one of writing for men. I've always wanted to have women well represented in the work that I've done because I've always been around them and around the way they look at the world.

Some writers pick a topic and write around that, but I like to include it all.

There's a difference between children's literature and all-ages literature. One is written expressly for children. The other is written for everyone, including children. And the difference usually manifests in not talking down to kids.

The more foreign to me, to my existence, to your core existence, the more foreign the foreign language, it's really moving to me to think, to get to experience my own story crossing those boundaries. To have that experience that I so cherished as a reader. I can't believe this. To me, it's really nice because that would be a thing where I'm like, "There may be lots of Jews in my work. I'm not writing stories for Jews. I'm telling stories about people, and Jews are people, too."

I discovered that I, a writer of what is known as creative nonfiction, could do the research and bridge the gap in my books and lectures through true storytelling. This is not 'dumbing down' or writing for eighth graders. It is writing for readers across cultures, age barriers, social and political landscapes.

As a woman, I don't feel like I have a responsibility to create better female characters. I feel like I have a responsibility to create good characters. Because the truth is, those kinds of things ghettoize us even more as writers.

It wasn't conscious, but I guess that one book is the reaction to the other. The first is so imprisoned in a male point-of-view, and the second is a point-of-view that can go anywhere it wants.

Years and years ago, I said I did not want to write academic books. I want to write books that are in the language of the common person so that Joe, who didn't even go to college, can sit down and read my book and get it and apply it to his life.

Something I love about 'Teen Wolf' is that my character is written in as just a normal girl. She could have been any ethnicity; she doesn't have to be Asian.