Tanya Saracho

I went in for a meeting with Marta Fernandez, and she said, 'We are looking for a female millennial show. Have you heard of the term 'chipster'?' And I was like, 'Of course - Chicana hipster.'

When you work in a writers room for a showrunner, you serve that story, and you serve that showrunner. I don't think it should be called writing; I think it should be called rendering content. Because you are there to render the content that is agreed upon in the room, and you're serving the voice of the main storyteller, which is the showrunner.

I dress up cute sometimes to go to work, but TV writers don't! They just go however.

The hierarchy plays out in the writers room, and you, as a staff writer, need to know your place.

I hope to see more Latino stories on television - not just on a personal level, but for us in the industry. We shouldn't just exist when a show is attempting to be diverse. We have good stories, and we are worth it.

I just wanted to put together the best Latinx writers. I didn't care about the level.They have a passion for 'Vida' in a different way, in a higher way.

I feel like progress will be made in the landscape of Latino influence when we get to tell those murky, real, close-to-life narratives.

I was obsessed with everything about 'Outlander' - the stories, the way it looked. I thought, 'You know what? I'm going to go to Scotland, and I'm going to find my own 'Outlander.''

My first time up to bat as a showrunner, what I did was hire an all-Latinx writers room. And it's a diverse Latinx writers room - we have an Afro-Dominican and Texicans and Chileans. It's diverse within its Latinidad.

I am not a quiet person.

When I got to 'Looking,' I didn't know that you could write stuff and they would put it on TV. That was that experience. My boss was Andrew Haigh and he came from film; he had never done TV. It was his first TV show, and he was running it. And I think he was like, 'Write it, and we'll put it on.' It was lovely.

Other people started taking me seriously before I took myself seriously.

I am equally a writer and an actor and a director.

Pleasures. I had to cut them back so I can write. And it's worked! It so has. But I am the most boring human on the planet.

We don't have a lot of narrative on TV or film, mainstream film, of brown queers. Latina queers, I can't think of that many.

At Shondaland, six out of nine writers were of color - not Latinx, but I was like, 'Wait, I can do that but for the whole room?' 'Atlanta' had done that, then I can do that.

When you change media, perception is changed and then policy is changed.

When 'Vida' got the green light, Starz sent me this picnic basket of Jamie Fraser red wine and all these 'Outlander' things that I'll never open because it's like my sacred thing.

I never wanted to be married. That was never a thing for me.

I want to stay in Chicago.

I'm queer - and queer, to me, is not being stuck in a binary and being kind of fluid.

Spanglish is very natural. It's however it comes out. But there are a few patterns that all of us, especially Mexican-American writers, just noticed in how we utilized Spanglish. It comes out of necessity when you can't find the next word. You go to whatever language will serve you best.

I get a lot of emails of scripts and pilots, and they want me to give feedback, and sometimes I can't because it's so many.

I know people seek me out to be their mentor, and I've chosen a few people I'm really invested in and nurturing their career and their aesthetic and just their person.

I'm not a good business person when it comes to my writing.

To me, 'Kita y Fernanda' is very much an American story, and I know some people are going to think it's a Latina story, but it's about shifting people's paradigms and views of what it is to be American.

I'm not literary, and I'm not academic, and I don't think like a poet, so my stuff will never be like that.

I'm interested in people's darkness - and humor in the darkness.

Nothing against resorts or Cancun or Carlos 'n Charlie's, but Guanajuato is different. If you want history, culture, and peace, it's perfect.

It's mountains. The air is crisp. It's peaceful. You don't get spring break in Guanajuato.

I'm always in the car in L.A., so I see the people I work with - and, thank God, I adore the people I work with - but it's a little lonely.

Young men and women of color get told 'no' by so many people. But just listen to your inner voice. Amplify it. Make it strong!

Putting on makeup before work is a meditative exercise. It incites me to think about how I'll tackle my day.

When you're a starving artist, you make do. It didn't matter that I didn't know where my rent was coming from.

There is no 'generic' Latina.

The thing is about 'Vida,' we're telling a very simple family narrative. There's nothing fancy about it.

Sometimes, when I was the only person of color in a room, you had to defend all the people of color everywhere.

What I notice a lot about millennials is that they have agency over their sexuality.

I have been watching male programming all my life. And I'm completely interested in it. Like, I love 'Breaking Bad' and I like 'Game of Thrones.'

Raul Castillo was my first high school boyfriend.

The big, radical thing that I'm trying to do is to portray Latinas as complex human beings.

White, older showrunners told me, 'Why do you want to hire an all-Latinx writers room? Hire who's best for the show - don't get caught up in that.' And I was like, 'No.' For such an intimate show about the details of a culture? You can't fake that. The room needs to reflect the makeup of the show.

The fact that I have a show on Starz, it's crazy. It's insane.

I would like to do more millennial, Latina, complicated stories.

I remember 'Resurrection Boulevard.' It was on for such a brief moment, but they were trying to do a good, Latino, Mexican-American family with a patriarch.

I'm always writing. There's no stopping. It's just that you can't see it sometimes.

You can't visit Guanajuato without going to the mummy museum.

Shouldn't you be able to tell your stories from your point of view? We're dealing with that with 'Looking' where some queers are like, 'These guys are so boring! They don't represent me!' But no show can represent everything, so is it OK for us, in 'Looking,' to write about these three men and their world?

For so long, the narrative - I'm speaking for Latinx - we've been invisible, the ones cleaning and taking care of your kids and doing your lawns.

I'm very conscious of who I work with. Because I want to develop and nurture my writers so they can have their own shows, take on whatever is next for them.