Story & Psyche: My Manifesto

Once there was a girl who loved to tell stories. She told what she knew, and what she liked to imagine, and her stories were full of girls who battled dragons, rescued princes from certain peril, and faced evil to save the world. And then one day someone told her the real world doesn’t want to read about girls who save the day. And if she wanted to be a real writer — a sellable, serious writer — she had to change her stories to fit in with the expectations of the world.

So she did. And her characters battled each other instead of dragons, they argued over who was the one in danger and her villains couldn’t be bothered to take over the world.

So she stopped writing about them. She stopped believing she could write stories, and eventually she stopped telling stories at all. She didn’t even notice when the world went grey.

The world around her now was full of limits. People were unchanging and scared of the unknown. Ideas of exploration and invention were hushed in favour of what had already been discovered. Adventures were spoken of with wistful looks of dreams left unfulfilled and doors left unopened.

One day, she went rummaging through an old box, covered in dust, and she found a story. And when she read it, she remembered imagining a world with limitless possibilities and turning everything, even a walk through a parking lot, into a story to be told. A kaleidoscope of colour and imagination poured over her, and her world was transformed. Looking out the window, she saw the real world had hardened and turned to concrete without the lifeblood of change.

Armies of feet marched one direction along the road, day in, day out, following the safety of their routine. No one noticed the trees had turned to dust or the concrete barriers that crept towards the sky. They didn’t see they were boxed in by the monotony, fear funnelling them along them along the known path.

And she thought: we need to remember what it was like to believe in magic. When instead of seeing shadows and fear behind every door, they saw adventure and new ideas. People needed to see that a box could be a spaceship, that sometimes wishes did come true, and that different doesn’t always mean danger.

We need to remember what it was like to believe in magic.

So as feet marched one direction and back again, she picked up a pen; she whispered in waiting ears. She told what she had always known and what she wanted to believe in, and her stories were full of girls saving the world, of galaxies millennia away and creatures no one had ever seen and people that battled one another and the unknown.

She looked at a world tinted by her imagination and she didn’t want to fit in. The real world needed people who would plant seeds of change in between the concrete. She didn’t want to stick to one path telling her where to go and who she should be.

She wanted to tell the stories that flooded her imagination, and she realised that’s what made her a real writer — a sellable, serious writer — because the world needed stories that expanded its expectations. It needed stories about magic, about girls who challenged evil, about adventures to the edge of the universe, and of a reality where people believe they can make the impossible happen.

The real world needed people who would plant seeds of change in between the concrete.

So she walks a new path, telling stories that sprout and spread with each seed planted along the way. She imagines a world without concrete barriers and one road turned into many paths waiting to be explored. A world where we haven’t stopped testing our limits and where there is always a new impossible daring to be reached.

Wouldn’t that be magical?