Amarachi Okoli: Dear Carmen Maria Machado: I Tell Myself Stories to Come Up With More Stories to Tell

Dear Carmen Maria Machado: I Tell Myself Stories to Come Up with More Stories to Tell

By Amarachi Okoli

I told myself my first story in the third grade. It was three loose-leaf notebook pages long (whether it was college-ruled or wide ruled, I do not remember, although I do remember distinctly that I wrote it with a black pen). After many minutes of tireless writing, which resulted in a very tired right hand, I carried my story fresh off the press (quite literally) downstairs to debut it to my family members. After seeing their response to my story, I was, to say the least, inspired to continue writing and have not stopped since. Put quite simply, I have not stopped telling myself stories so that I can come up with more stories to tell, to myself and others. And there is a lot of machine work that goes into making this sort of thing happen.

Telling myself stories does nothing less than stimulate my imagination and ability to imagine the wildest things. I sometimes think of my mind as a mini movie theater. Where do the movies come from? The answer is quite intuitive, actually: experiences and relationships, current and past. I take these experiences and relationships and twist them up in a fantastical way so that they present something new, realities that range from brilliantly impossible and marginally tangible. Never do I ever consider imagining such impossible things to be a waste of time, because somewhere in that mess of impossible, I always seem to pick out something conceivable, which then travels from my mind to the pen, with my hand as a vehicle to the terminus, the paper in front of me. The more I tell myself stories, the more my imagination is worked, and thus, the more stories come out.

I kind of wish this next part was not quite true, but, sadly, it is: telling myself stories is kind of an escape. Guilty pleasure, I know, but I cannot lie. If you really want to call it what it is, please go ahead. Yeah, it’s called “daydreaming.” Now, this is no escape in the sense that it serves as a coping mechanism and nothing else, but escape in the sense of entertainment. I kid you not… every night as I go to bed, I look forward to closing my eyes to open my mind to my own little movie theater and just imagine until sleep takes the reins. I can literally and figuratively escape from pretty much everything else and concoct different pleasant ideas in my mind, for my own fun and also for my recognizance of them sometime in the future that could potentially lead to the birth of new stories.

Lastly, I continue to tell myself stories, because it keeps me up at night doing a strange dance between resting my head on my pillow and pulling out my phone yet again to jot down notes for improving the writings I already have. Sometimes I wish my imagination would stop working so that my mind can actually rest. Although imagining and coming up with stories of my own is not something I consider a chore. I know that once I stop telling myself stories of my own making, I never actually stop thinking about stories, so the only stories I do think about can only come from other places. This results in what I actually end up thinking about and writing down becoming less and less original. Sure, my life is distinctly unique from others, as theirs are from mine, but without that creative element of me coming up with stories to tell myself, which can consist of spinoff versions of my own past experiences, most of what I would end up writing down would sound like a lot of other stories.

All this to say? Every story I tell myself builds off the previous. With every story told, my imagination grows so that I can tell myself better stories in order to ultimately tell other people better stories. What does it really mean for me to tell myself stories? Nothing more than just drawing from events and ideas that have influenced me, the relationships I currently hold or held it in the past, or wishes and hopes buried in the back of my mind that could come to pass, in real life or on paper, and putting them all together into one big storyline that runs for as long as I want it to, as long as I remember where my first story started from.