How I Write - Tony Maniaty

There's an old adage in journalism: 'A good story tells itself.' True, but not entirely true. I see myself as a storyteller, and if we break that into two words, 'story' and 'teller', we get the whole game: first you've got to find a story worth telling, and then you've got to shape the material, to 'tell' the story in ways that brings it to life. Stand-up comics know all about this problem; it pretty much haunts their lives. You've got the set-up, but how to tell it?

That's really the dilemma I face every day as a writer. I've never had a great problem with finding stories; mostly I've got too many. Maybe that's the journalist in me, because you're trained to smell out stories instinctively. Someone's telling you about why they've left their partner, or changing their job, and you're already hearing behind that the basis for a story: the motivations, the characters and the conflict, where the story really starts (usually much further back than the teller thought) and where it ends, the arc of the whole bloody thing.

All this needs to be structured in ways (unseen by the reader, hopefully) that raise tough questions, provide intense drama, offer mystery while playing with the reader's inbuilt sense of curiosity, relate something original about the human race (en masse, or just the lonely guy) and justify the purchase price of the book and hours spent reading it. Oh, and along the way you'll need to passionately evoke a few universal truths; things like loyalty, betrayal, love, honour, justice...

Once I saw a newspaper ad that said, 'Be a bulldozer driver! It's easy when you know how!!' That struck me as hilarious. How easy is it to be a bulldozer driver? It doesn't even look easy. Writing looks easy, but some days you're just pushing dirt across an allotment, other days you're making steady progress, and a few days every month you're flying where no writer, no artist has even flown before! Or so you think. Then you watch Steve Martin doing his stand-up magic routine on YouTube, and you're absolutely crushed.

He's brilliant, and you're a hack.

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