Writing Beyond Borders: How I Learned to Reach a Global Audience With Storytelling

When I first began presenting television in Brazil, I was a young journalist filled with curiosity and nerves. My stories were rooted in the daily pulse of Rio de Janeiro—the conversations on the street, noise of protests, laughter in cafés, political arguments that always end with coffee. I thought my job was simply to document what was happening around me. But television travels. And so do ideas.

(Writing Small Stories With a Big Impact.)

As my work began to reach viewers in other countries, I was surprised to receive messages from people who didn’t speak Portuguese yet somehow connected with the essence of what I was showing. That was when I realized: Good storytelling doesn’t belong to one nation. It belongs to everyone who feels something when they encounter truth.

Today, with digital media erasing borders faster than we can define them, every writer and journalist faces the same question: Will my story speak beyond where it was born?

Over two decades as a journalist, TV hosts and book promoters have taught me that four universal themes carry across every culture and every language: identity and belonging, change and transition, hidden voices, and cross-cultural communication.

No matter where we live, the longing to belong is what makes us human. In Rio’s favelas, I’ve interviewed young artists who used music and graffiti to claim visibility in a city that often forgets them. Their lyrics and colors said what words could not: We are here. We matter. That desire to be seen, to be counted, to have one’s story recognized resonates in every corner of the world.

When we write, it’s tempting to over-generalize in the hope of reaching everyone. But paradoxically, the more specific we are, the more universal we become. A grandmother’s accent, a childhood street, a recipe handed down for generations. Those are the details that make readers thousands of miles away feel the pulse of their own childhoods.

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is a masterclass in this. Its Chinese American mothers and daughters are so distinct, so rooted in their own textures like the smell of sesame oil, the mahjong tiles clicking, yet the longing for understanding between parent and child feels as close as our own living rooms.

When I write or broadcast, I remind myself: Specificity is a form of empathy. It’s how we tell our readers, “I trust you to enter my world.”

Every report I’ve ever filed begins with something in motion such as a system, a community, a person, or even a belief. Change is the constant heartbeat of storytelling, because everyone knows what it feels like to watch the ground shift beneath them.

Early in my career, I covered a small fishing town facing environmental collapse. The tides had changed, the fish were disappearing, and with them, a centuries-old way of life. On the surface it was an environmental story, but what stayed with me were the faces: an elderly fisherman teaching his grandson to mend nets they might never use again. That image—the transmission of knowledge in a vanishing world—was universal.

Change has many faces: social, economic, personal, even spiritual. When we frame it through human stakes, readers anywhere can relate.

Gabriel García Márquez did this in One Hundred Years of Solitude, chronicling the rise and fall of Macondo. Though the novel is deeply Colombian, the emotional truth of progress followed by nostalgia, abundance followed by loss, belongs to all of us. As nonfiction writers, our responsibility is to translate statistics into stories of transition. We interpret the rhythm of human adaptation while we inform.

The greatest privilege of journalism is to hand the microphone to someone who’s never been asked for their story. Over the years, I’ve spoken with domestic workers, street vendors, and survivors of tragedy. Their courage taught me that dignity is something we reveal by listening well. In an era of social media noise, amplification can easily become exploitation. The key is listening without agenda, allowing people to narrate their experiences in their own cadence, with pauses, contradictions, and quiet strength intact.

When Katherine Boo wrote Behind the Beautiful Forevers, she didn’t merely “cover” Mumbai’s Annawadi slum, known for its extreme poverty against a backdrop of luxury hotels and the airport. Boo spent years with the people there, letting their words shape the story. That patience created something rare in the form of a book that reads like a novel but stands as meticulous journalism. Readers around the world embraced it because it was about persistence, a value shared across every culture.

In my own work, I think of amplification as a bridge. The goal is to make voices heard across divides.

I’ve reported in rooms where three languages are spoken at once, and yet emotion still travels faster than translation. Writing for a global audience is about translating your emotion into universally legible language. When I write a television script, I often pause to imagine how a viewer in another country would see it. Would they understand the tone? The stakes? The humor? If not, I add a line of context as an invitation.

Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens exemplifies this generosity. His language is scholarly yet clear; his metaphors simple but elegant. He trusts his global readers to think with him, not just read him. Data from BookBub’s global audience research shows that international readers gravitate toward stories that “balance specificity with accessibility.” That’s our challenge as nonfiction writers: to honor detail while ensuring that the emotion remains visible through translation.

A global-readership checklist:

1. Is it human first, local second? Emotion crosses borders faster than exposition.

2. Have you given enough context for an outsider? If a reader might not know a reference, add one orienting sentence. Context is compassion.

3. Are your details sensory, not symbolic? Universality lives in the senses.

4. Could it survive translation? Simplify without dulling the music.

5. Does it show change? Every universal story involves motion—something or someone evolving.

6. Do you feature more than one voice? Multiple perspectives broaden empathy.

7. Would someone in another time or country recognize the truth here? If it feels true beyond its coordinates, it’s ready to travel.

After decades of covering politics, art, and everyday resilience, I’ve realized that the global reader isn’t a stranger. They’re simply another human being looking for meaning in someone else’s story.

Whether I’m writing another book chapter, interviewing a lawmaker about governance or a young woman rebuilding her life after tragedy, I’ve learned that our differences only matter because they reveal what we share: fear, faith, hope, resilience.

Good storytelling is an act of translation between worlds. When we write beyond borders, we import empathy. And that, to me, is the highest purpose of storytelling: to make truth feel human everywhere.