A Quote by Vivek Shraya

Generally, I start by observing the existing and popular narratives in my social spheres and media, and the pressures I face in my own life experiences. As someone who is "newly" trans, I am constantly thinking about what the dominant narratives are around transness, how my work can push against these narratives, and how it already falls into these traps.
The media doesn't create narratives, really. They're not that powerful. What they do is they tap into narratives that are already bubbling amongst their viewership or readership.
Adults need more complex narratives. They have their own narratives. The main characters are themselves.
I have always been aware that I can never represent all trans people. No one or two or three trans people can. This is why we need diverse media representations of trans folks to multiply trans narratives in the media and depict our beautiful diversities.
Everybody's always living in fiction just as much as children, but the way our stories are faked is curtailed by all sorts of narratives we take into our own lives about what are the true narratives and what's not.
As a friend at a major American newspaper said to me when I complained about this tendency in his own paper, "You know how these media narratives are. They're like bamboo." Meaning, once they start growing, you can't kill them.
I'm often associated with parallel narratives or dual narratives. The 'Devil in the White City' was a fluke.
North Korea aside, most authoritarian governments have already accepted the growth of the Internet culture as inevitable; they have little choice but to find ways to shape it in accord with their own narratives - or risk having their narratives shaped by others.
My role in the government was not to think about narratives and consistency with narratives, but think of the human consequences of rules.
To me, it's just that social media is allowing people to be in charge of their own narratives.
Narratives are not fixed. We change our narratives for ourselves and we change them not necessarily deliberately. In other words, some people do, some people will constantly reconstruct their biography for external purposes, it's a very interesting political ploy.
Pierrot le Fou is something I keep coming back to. Its so surreal but still really engaging - it proves narratives within narratives are a landscape that can be pursued well.
'Pierrot le Fou' is something I keep coming back to. It's so surreal but still really engaging - it proves narratives within narratives are a landscape that can be pursued well.
The real world is devoid of narratives, after all. Narratives are just a thing that our brains do with facts in order to draw a line around the incomprehensible largeness of reality and wrestle it into something learnable and manipulable. Existence is devoid of plot, theme, and most of all moral.
I think we all are born inside of our parents' narratives. We stay there for a good while. We are taught their narratives about everything: their marriage, the world, God, gender, identity, etcetera. Then, at some point, our own narrative develops too much integrity to live inside that story. We don't ever fully escape it, but we move into our own stories.
I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about.
In spite of recent trends towards fabricating photographic narratives, I find, more than ever, traditional photographic capture, the 'discovery' of found narratives, deeply compelling.
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