When I started reading and writing books, so very long ago, I didn’t have a perspective on them at all. I just liked some books and didn’t like others, no idea why. I just wrote the stuff my brain imagined, no idea why.
As I entered high school, our amazing system of education basically killed my love for reading entirely. I only wrote snippets here and there and only read a single book (of the twelve I was supposed to read to pass my exams).
At university I finally returned to reading and writing a lot. Why? Because I’d found a new perspective. I had actually found a reason for telling stories, a way to convince myself it was worth it.
That perspective was education. We started telling stories long ago because it was a great way to inform and warn others of potential dangers. At its simplest, a story about some mammoth trampling grandpa five years ago is an educational story about the danger of mammoths. A reminder for the kids listening to the story to not make the same mistake. As humans and societies became more complex, the stories became more complex too, and they started teaching more complicated topics. They started discussing morality, started showing the consequences of being a prick. For the most part, they became a blend of educational, practical and philosophical.
Once I realized stories were a much better way to teach and discuss things, I had found a new reason to write them. I started taking my Saga of Life project seriously: short stories that explore some topic from history or science (mostly biology). I wrote a few other books that were focused on educating the reader about current problems in our world, wrapped inside a story that was hopefully exciting and tense and interesting.
And now, for the past year or so, I’ve been writing loads of short stories and story bundles for my upcoming online store. Stories with a much more specific and obvious educational perspective, because that entire store is about education. (It contains lesson materials, quizzes, puzzles and games to learn skills like counting, etcetera.) Every story I wrote was created with the clear intention of teaching something. Want to teach counting? Here’s my story about a world where numbers are magical and counting really matters in some fun way. Want to give kids a first lesson on, say, taxes? Here’s an imaginative story about a country which has really weird and fun systems of taxation that will speak to children.
I have never written stories that are so obviously, 100%, meant to be educational. They’re even fully marketed as such.
And for the most part this has gone really well. By not being shy about it, by focusing on that aspect, it actually became easier to figure out the right story lines and write a good number of words every day. For months on end, for many different stories and topics.
As such, I don’t write this article to say my previous perspective was bad or wrong. I still very much subscribe to it. We started telling stories because doing so meant we didn’t make the same mistakes as someone else, that we were prepared for danger, that we learned something in advance (…before it killed us). We started enjoying stories becaues doing so meant you lived longer and got more children, and the theory of evolution shows how such a preference becomes part of everyone’s DNA over time. Stories are educational and practical. And the more you forget that, the further you remove your story from anything educational or related to the real world, the more convoluted and less interesting it becomes.
But … something creeped into all those stories of mine. Almost all of them ended up having a similar theme or storyline. Sometimes it was very pronounced, sometimes it was just a single scene of a side character. But it was always there in one form or another.
Let me remind you that these are short stories. Very focused on one thing. Very much meant for young kids. Very busy exploring a basic topic like “multiplication” or “the alphabet”, without much room for anything else.
And still I wrote stories about evil kings, about fighting dictatorship, about learning a skill so you could get back your freedom, about learning to work together to fight someone doing evil things to your fairy tale land.
Most of those stories ended up being actively anti-evil.
But Tiamo, you might say, aren’t ALL stories about fighting evil?
No! They’re not! Pick up a random (young) children’s novel and you’ll find it’s about some random small problem. Like someone who pooped on a mole’s head. Like someone stubbing their toe, losing an item precious to them, doing badly in school, etcetera. Many stories are about presenting a (relatable/common) problem, and then showing one way to go about tackling or exploring it.
This is not the same as the specific type of story where the problem is someone actively being evil.
It’s the difference between unable to cross a river because there’s no bridge and there’s a bridge but it has a ludicrous cost. In the first instance, you just have a personal obstacle to overcome. In the second instance, someone is actively abusing their bridge to get the most out of those who want to cross.
It’s the difference between doing badly in school because you didn’t learn and doing badly in school because the teacher hates you and is doing everything to hurt your grade. In the first instance, it’s a personal flaw and/or decision. A child might not even personally see it as an obstacle to overcome—boring story! In the second instance, it’s someone actively working against you and abusing their power to bring you down while you did no wrong.
My favorite stories are anti-evil. You know, the stories that actually made an impact (perhaps when I was very young), the ones I still remember, the ones I would recommend or rewatch or think of in dire times. The stories that inspired me to keep working hard. Gave me the energy to keep fighting against things like our terrible system of education, even though I have no strong evidence for believing that system will dramatically change in my lifetime. Any story that is not anti-evil feels like meaningless fluff to me and usually can’t hold my interest at all.
After writing for so many years, and seeing how naturally this creeped into every story, this made my perspective shift.
Good stories are about fighting some evil force that will inevitably keep arriving.
Because this is literally the point of life. This is literally the thing that defines being a good person, doing good, leading a worthy life. Did you fight back evil? Did you stand by and watch as it arrived? Or did you even aid it or instigate it yourself?
Stories, in my current view, should be about inspiring people to keep fighting evil. Not necessarily saying what is evil, or educating on that, although that’s an inherit consequence of telling such a story. No, about inspiring people to keep up the energy and keep fighting the evil.
Evil will always keep coming. There will always be people trying to abuse power, to hoard wealth and be greedy, to bully others, to put energy into ruining something just out of spite. Evil is never defeated; it’s always lurking in the shadows, waiting.
Which means we should inspire people to always be vigilant and keep fighting for the good. We should especially inspire children to stay critical thinkers and actively fight evil when they notice it around them. And, to me, that’s where stories really shine and find their place.
Now, when I say “evil”, many will be quick to think of large scale fantasy epics like Lord of the Rings. Some massive fight between the good guys and the bad guys. And yes, those are included, but that’s far too narrow a definition. Evil can be very small. It can be very subtle. It can be immediate; it can only reveal itself in a system long-term.
Sure, some book for my online store are fantasy stories about good people fighting evil kings and all that. But most of them are more subtle. Perhaps more “realistic” or “relatable”. They’re about simple things like being honest when people pressure you into lying or ignoring reality. It’s about standing up against bullies. It’s about knowing what your (human) rights are and not letting someone tred over them. Things kids can and should learn about through magical, imaginative, well-told stories.
In a more practical sense, most of my stories are anti-authoritarian or pro-freedom. It’s simply impossible to be against evil deeds but for taking away freedom and letting others rule over you. Because, well, if those others command you to do something evil … by your own logic, you are now forced to do the evil thing. That’s why the “anti-evil” narrative will usually turn out this way, but it doesn’t have to 100% of the time.
When I noticed this creeping into my stories, I had a moment of doubt. Wasn’t this too serious? Especially for young kids? Do I really need to put an evil king in a stories about teaching basic shapes?
I decided to go through with it anyway, for all the reasons mentioned above. It makes for much better stories. More tense, more realistic, more meaningful. It achieves the most important thing a story can do: inspire you to keep fighting evil, small or large. It feels more natural and makes it much easier for me to get a story that flows and has nice pacing. It motivates me more to actually write those stories.
Will this upset some parents? Probably. Will some kids not grasp the full implications of parts of the story? Highly likely, as it always has been. I loved many Pixar films as a child; I only full understood them as an adult. Will I lose potential sales or popularity because of that? Yup.
But these are the stories I feel are actually worth writing and reading. These are the best stories. These are stories that aren’t really being written by anyone else, not for children and certainly not with an educational slant to them. If parents want a very safe and traditional kids’ story … they are free to buy one from the many other authors that write them.
These are my latest reflections after another year of nearly non-stop reading and writing. I highly encourage everyone else to start looking at stories this way too: a way to inspire people to keep fighting some evil. It makes for better stories. It’s what they were meant to do. And it’s what we desperately need, at all times, but certainly now.
Now, you might wonder, what might inspire Tiamo to finally write this article?
If you’ve followed the news at all, you know that the United States are in a pretty terrible place right now. I don’t live there. I have no intention of going there, never had, I’ll stick to the superior protection and regulations of the EU, thank you very much. But it still frightens me what’s happening there. How easily rights are taken away, freedoms limited, people used as a toy by rich idiots like Trump, economies wrecked just to make the ultra-rich even richer.
It’s no surprise that it happens. It’s no surprise that Trump and his goons would try this shit. It’s a surprise, to me, how easily everyone voted for him, rolled over, and now just accepts that democracy in America is nearly gone. How easily people ignore evil deeds if they’re not directly affecting them. Or, if they are, to say “it’ll probably blow over” or “nah I don’t want to overreact and look silly” and let it happen. There’s this saying—“Do Not Obey In Advance”—that many people need to hear.
No, this is not hyperbole. It is very, very, very bad out there. Because that’s how quickly it can go: 6 months, and rarely anyone prepared to fight the evil, and your country could be a hellscape too.
Evil will always keep coming back. It waits in the shadows until people are too comfortable, too complacent, to notice its return. We need stories to teach and inspire people to watch for it and find the courage to fight it. Those are the kinds of stories I will be writing, even for young kids, even surrounding some educational topic.
Of course, I trust my experience and instincts to modulate this based on the target audience. “Evil” will be small, somewhat whimsical and relatable in a story for 5-year-olds. Harsher evil, more realistic evil, will mostly be reserved for older ages. I have no intention to be controversial, or to traumatize children, or to pretend my stories are only for “super intelligent children” or whatever. I have an intention to write good stories that are both educational and inspire you to be good.
It’s not easy to find a way to marry some (educational) topic and a tense anti-evil story, I’ll admit. But it’s also not incredibly hard. Simply change a random problem or accidental conflict, into someone evil creating the problem on purpose.
I have a bundle of stories about basic shapes. I did all the usual worldbuilding things to make this magical and educational: I invented a land where everyone is made out of a basic shape, where magic happens through shapes, where the king is a Triangle, etcetera. Many of the short stories are directly related to something funny with shapes, such as trying to unlock a treasure with a shape code.
This plan would probably have been … fine. Just some silly little stories about shapes. Nice way to teach them and make kids remember them. But I was not excited to write it and it all felt a bit wishy-washy.
Until I made the king evil. He forces everyone to be a Triangle, like him, because of some backstory that is revealed over time. This created both more hilarious stories (as the animals desperately try to create triangular soccer fields and all) and more tense stories (as a non-Triangle animal has to hide and lie and try to get away when the king suddenly visits). This turned the entire bundle into animals fighting for freedom and for being allowed to be any shape they want. Which is relatable, leads to organic stories, tied everything together, and is exactly the kind of inspiring message that kids understand and should hear.
Just by making the story anti-evil, I wrote that bundle in record time and think the stories (both individually and as a whole) are very strong. While still clearly teaching basic shapes and being suitable for young children.
It can be done. I will try to do it.
Now, can someone please convince all the ministers in the Netherlands to tell Israel to fuck off instead of “maybe considering perhaps a stern warning some time in the future for slaughtering innocents and seizing territory”?
Until next time,
Tiamo