@adiaspeaks taught me important lessons when I started writing a newspaper column. She asked me if what I was writing was at first understood by the audience and secondly if that was what they wanted to read?

This is the same for all narrative including tweets, blogs, and books

I used to wonder why people dumb things down and I realized that it was to reach the widest possible audience. If the goal is to convince people about something or make money, it achieves both. It is why you have editors and publishers. They decide what's best commercially.

With publications, you don't "resist the urge to shalaye" because the audience expects you to "shalaye". A great writer learns over time how to keep the audience enthralled. I have read books of some very great writers and they are not whom we think. Great writers are prolific.

The greatest writers write fiction. They don't write biographies and business books because they are boring. @GRRM and @jk_rowling are the greatest writers of our time and that was why it was easy for their works to transcend written form to other media and remain hits.

Biographies and business books rarely make it to the big screen without fiction being infused in the screen narrative. Mark Zuckerberg hated the movie "The Social Network" and claimed many things there were not factual. His autobiography will never be as popular as that movie.

Storytelling is an agenda game. Disney was the master of it. He took stories and turned them to magic. Monetized every aspect of those stories and made a fortune. Those who succeed in the storytelling business first understand that their audience is the world. They dumb it down.

I realized @adiaspeaks was right because as I started making things simpler, my social media following grew. I later realized that if I had to do anything beyond articles, I would have to do the same thing.

For Nkali, that is what we intend to do. Make everyone understand.

My Egbon Lateef Belo-Osagie was always right about one thing. Pushing your chest out that you know more than others is not how to make money. Empathy is the biggest moneymaker on Earth and that is why Disney is now doing more ethnic narratives. Moana was a hit as Pocahontas.

We shouldn't wait for Disney and others to come and do it for us again. What we have missed about African content is that we can create a narrative for the world which is not necessarily factual and they will love it. America is NOT Hollywood but many outside think it is.

Nobody wants to see the poor and dirty parts of Africa really. Not many outside are interested in human sacrifice or the occult as they have seen enough. Blood and Water took a sensitive subject and built a snazzy high-class narrative around it. People now see Africa differently.