Hey guys! Megan Tennant here and welcome back to my channel. Now that you've
clicked angrily into this video hopefully you'll listen a little while
before you comment to attack me but yeah the title of this video didn't lie this
video is about why I don't write diversity. Now for those of you who have
read my books, you're thinking what the hell is she talking about? And for those
of you who haven't you're probably wanting to boycott my books forever. But let
me explain. You see I don't write diversity because saying that I write
diverse books would be like saying that I write books with characters. That's not
something you say. That's the default that's assumed and I really wish that
was something they applied to diversity and so to help push it towards that
that's how I'm going to treat it in my own writing. I don't write diverse
because I write realistic and realistic is diverse. Diversity is realistic people
it's not that hard. When you create a character you pick different traits for
that character, right? You'd never create a whole cast of people with blond hair,
that'd be completely ridiculous unless your entire cast is in the same family.
That's just not something you would do. You pick a different hair colors for
your different characters, you pick different genders you, pick different
heights, it's the same thing with diversity. If you wouldn't have a cast
of all people with blonde hair you should have a caste of all white people.
It's the same concept. So I've seen a lot of videos talking about diversity and
you'll hear a lot of things about how representation is important and it
hugely is. It's important to represent different people because you always want
to be able to see yourself in artistic work. Now that doesn't mean that you need
to shove every kind of representation into your book. Not at all. Because it's
impossible to represent every kind of person in your book. It's just not gonna
happen. Whenever you're creating a character you choose hair color eye
color, just when you're doing that go ahead and throw in race, sexuality,
disabilities, character traits. This is normal character creation guys. You can
have multiple blonde characters, you can have multiple white characters, but you
should have variation in all of the different aspects of your characters.
You can write a cast of the twins or you can write a cast of people that are their
own people. And when you make your cast diverse they'll feel a lot more real to
the readers, trust me. So one of the things that I pride myself in in Aletheia
(and I've gotten quite a bit of praise on) is the characters feeling real and
well-rounded. So a lot of that is because they're each their own people and that
includes the whole bundle. There's not a lot that they share between each other
in terms of who they are because that's real. That's real life. That's the real
world. We all have similarities, but we also have a lot of differences and
that's what makes us real. Alright guys well that was it for this
video. I got a little ranty there. Yeah hopefully you guys watch this far before
commenting angrily. I love seeing casts of incredible mixes of people so just
remember when I say that I don't write diverse books I don't mean that my casts
are not diverse I mean that when I'm writing I write realistic cast because
for me diversity is the default. That's just like, that should be assumed.
It should be assumed the casts are going to be diverse. Saying that I write
diverse books is like saying that I write books with humans in them and I
mean I guess some books have aliens in them as the main characters and
there's no humans, but the vast majority you can assume has some variation of
humans in them. That's how I view diversity. So if you feel the same or if you feel
different, if you have any comments at all leave them down below I'd love to
hear them. Hopefully not all the comments are attacking me for the title
but if you watch this far thank you for watching and I'll see you guys in the
next video!