Like most kids, Soman Chainani was raised on a steady diet of Disney growing up.
“We didn’t have Nintendo, Netflix, video games, all the stuff that kids have today. We had Disney movies,” Chainani says in the latest episode of Fast Company‘s podcast Creative Conversation. “All 45 animated movies were at my house, and I just watched them 24-7. I knew every movie, every frame, every line.”
Disney’s grip on Chainani was so firm, in fact, that he applied to work at the company as an analyst in strategic planning fresh out of college.
“If I had got that job, I think my life would’ve been completely different,” Chainani says.
Different indeed.
Chainani operates in the world of fairy tales as a young adult author, but his vision is far darker and more complex.
Consider him the “alt Walt.”
“I started to realize that my childhood, in a lot of ways, was based on a lie and that these Disney fairy tales teach the opposite of what the original fairy tales taught,” Chainani says of Disney’s source material largely comprised of sanitized versions of the Brothers Grimm fairytales. “The original fairy tales taught that sometimes good wins, sometimes evil wins. Both sides are aware of each other, but you don’t actually identify with good or evil. You have to be a little bit of both in order to slide your way through life.”
Chainani’s debut novel and series The School for Good and Evil, which Netflix is adapting as a film with director Paul Feig at the helm, is a direct subversion of the typical princess tale.
The main catalyst for the series stems from two young girls getting dropped off at the wrong fairy tale academies. Sophie, the beautiful blonde ripe for a future prince gets stuck at the school for evil, while her brooding, misanthropic friend Agatha is dropped off at the school for good.
“That is a corrupting influence, the idea that you are either good or evil and you’re on one side. And I think it infects everything in this country. I think it infects everything up to our politics,” Chainani says. “That seeded in my head that so many kids like me were growing up with Disney-fied values when the true fairy tales taught something very different. That’s where the seed of an alternative fairy tale universe started.”
Chainani recently extended his universe with Beasts and Beauty: Dangerous Tales, a collection of Brothers Grimm fairy tales with a modern twist.
For example, the story of Snow White turns the titular princess into the only Black girl in the kingdom, adding a deeper layer of complexity to her struggle with her white stepmother and who the fairest in the land truly is. Little Red Riding Hood becomes a reflection of society’s disregard for women, with the townspeople routinely sacrificing their prettiest maidens to a pack of wolves so they may be spared.
“I thought, in an immense act of hubris and ambition, ‘I’m going to pretend I am the original writer of these tales. So what do I want the generations to learn? Let’s redo them. Let’s make them work for today’s world,’” Chainani says. “It was a lofty ambition, but I think I needed that in order not to be precious about the stories and start from the seed of what they actually were about.”
In this episode of Creative Conversation, Chainani goes deeper into his alternative vision for fairy tales, why the rules of YA novels need to be broken, and more.
Check out highlights of the conversation below and the full episode wherever you enjoy your podcasts.
Giving princesses power
What’s so interesting about the Disney version of the stories is that the idea of good and evil doesn’t occur to the hero or heroine. They just happen to be virtuous and kind, and they’re oblivious. They’re almost passive vehicles for their story. And what I was more concerned about is, we live in this world where good and evil are defined for us and thrust upon us. To me, that’s what we wrestle with every day. Are we doing the right thing? Are we doing the wrong thing? These are the big questions, and I feel like we need fairy tales where the character’s actually awake, where the character’s actually self-aware enough to be thinking to themselves, “What’s the right thing? What’s the wrong thing?”
Breaking the YA Rules
With this new book, Beasts and Beauty, I set out saying, “I’m going to write a book that’s for adults and kids are going to read it and I’m not going to change any of it to make it kid friendly. It’s going to be an adult book and kids are going to be super into it.” Ultimately, a lot of these rules [in publishing young adult fiction] are just old. I think coming in with a fresh perspective of the publishing industry means you can disrupt and you can be a little bit of a flame thrower, which I do. I’m always challenging everybody to break the rules a little bit, because books are fighting an uphill challenge. Kids have video games, TikTok, YouTube, and everything. We’ve got to make it sexy again. The only way we’re going to do that is to make it feel renegade. So every one of my books has to feel like it’s pushing and it’s making kids feel like they’re in on a secret.
Writing from the “unconscious”
I believe the best writing comes from the unconscious. I rarely try to make any decisions consciously or in a cerebral way. It has to be instinctive, and it has to come from the gut. In order to access that, it’s very difficult. You can’t just sit down and work. You have to be able to tap into it. So, there’s a whole process. I exercise a ton. I’m into meditation. There’s a certain amount of sleep you have to get. You have to live life almost like an Olympic athlete, because you’re trying to summon this kind of muse and spirit that isn’t within your conscious control. You have to be so surrendered to it. So it’s difficult, and it definitely means my life is highly disciplined. But I think the end result is when I sit down to write, it almost feels like you’ve go into this fugue flow state where you’re not in control of it.
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Allyson Felix made headlines when she took home yet another gold medal in Tokyo this year. With 11 medals to her name, Felix had set a new record, making her the most decorated American track and field athlete in Olympic history.
Watch the Fast Company Innovation Festival Live now.
Felix has been uniquely influential off the track, too. While pregnant in 2018, she found herself mired in a dispute with Nike over the terms of her new sponsorship contract. After two former teammates spoke out about their own experiences with Nike, Felix revealed in a New York Times op-ed that Nike had proposed slashing her pay by 30% after she was pregnant—an offer she wouldn’t accept. Amid the public pressure, Nike eventually introduced a new maternity policy that secured protections for pregnant athletes, which barred the company from making any reductions in pay for 18 months or terminating a contract if an athlete declined to compete while pregnant.
A few months after going public with her story, Felix inked a new deal with women’s activewear brand Athleta. It was a first for Athleta, since the brand had never sponsored an athlete before. But Athleta also saw it as an opportunity to reimagine the relationship between athlete and sponsor.
“We set out to completely rewrite the playbook for athlete sponsorships,” Athleta CEO Mary Beth Laughton said during a panel at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, where she appeared alongside Felix. “A huge part of that is, first of all, partnering with people that have shared values with us—[that’s] so, so important—but then also really looking at the partners as full people who do so much in their lives and are, of course, amazing athletes, but are also mothers and entrepreneurs and activists.”
That means not only offering athletes the more traditional elements of a partnership, like product collaborations, but also empowering them to follow their other passions, whether that’s through social justice work or content creation. “Allyson definitely has a huge seat at the table, giving us her insights and her voice and her points of view on the product [and] everything else,” Laughton said, “and we so welcome that.”
Felix’s latest project with Athleta was an especially personal one. Leading up to the Olympics, Felix worked with Athleta and the Women’s Sports Foundation to launch a $200,000 grant that would help cover childcare costs for athletes who were competing. (The grant recipients, who are being awarded $10,000 each, will be announced in October.) “I came back right away from having my daughter back to competition,” Felix said. “I saw firsthand how difficult that is and how you need to be supported. I remember going to my first world championships [when my daughter] Cammy was 10 months old, and the challenge of bringing a child that young overseas. I had a roommate. How does that work? How are you breastfeeding?”
Though Felix has the support of a sponsor like Athleta, the same isn’t true for countless athletes—particularly those who go to the Olympics. For athletes who can’t rely on a lucrative sponsorship deal, a childcare stipend could be invaluable. “It was so important to be able to start to do something about this and really trying to shift the industry,” Felix said. “We hope that this is just the beginning—that we can really change the way that things are done.”
Felix’s advocacy for athletes who are mothers mirrors a larger trend in sports, one also embodied by the likes of Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles, both of whom have talked openly about their struggles with mental health. (Biles also happened to leave Nike and sign with Athleta earlier this year.) “I feel like the world is changing,” Felix said. “In the past, we haven’t given athletes much room to be able to seem human. They’re supposed to be invincible, and they’re supposed to be so tough.”
But athletes like Felix are using their platforms to usher in an era of greater honesty and transparency, and to remind the public that athletes have lives beyond their sport. “For the longest time, I really thought that people only cared about my performance,” she said. “Over the years, I’ve grown and obviously matured, and it was through my own experiences that I finally found my voice. Becoming a mother was probably one of the biggest ways that happened, and thinking about my daughter and the world that she’ll grow up in made me feel like, ‘Okay, I need to do this.’”
Editor’s Note: Each week Maynard Webb, former CEO of LiveOps and the former COO of eBay, will offer candid, practical, and sometimes surprising advice to entrepreneurs and founders. To submit a question, write to Webb at dearfounder@fastcompany….
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