How Jonathan Franzen almost stopped me writing my novel

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/08/how-jonathan-franzen-almost-stopped-me-writing-my-novel

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Jonathan Franzen. What a bastard. Thanks to him, about this time three years ago I seriously considered walking away from the novel I had been writing for a year (and contemplating for many more).

I had serious form on this front. In late 2008, just shy of a publishing deadline and deeply disenchanted with what I’d written over the previous eight months, I woke up one day to delete all 100,000 words of the narrative non-fiction manuscript I’d almost finished. Divorce was threatened. Children contemplated boarding school rather than living through a rewrite. But when I did re-do the book from scratch, it was far better for it.

And then, early in spring 2011, Jonathan Franzen turned up. In my city. To speak at the National Library of Australia. There, he riffed about how he’d spent five years trying to write the definitive political novel before – fortunately, he said – realising it was a waste of time and returning to his old hunting ground, the family, to produce what is rightly regarded as his second great novel, Freedom.

This is what he said: “Washington is already its own novel. There are new chapters every week, every hour, every day. There is no room for the novelist to exercise imagination ... I felt it my duty to make sympathetic Republican characters but I couldn’t get past my own anger at everything that has been done.”

Franzen’s timing was appalling. I was mired in the first draft of my own political tale, one that had been gestating since I’d returned from London to Australia in 2004 and which took form, of sorts, in a short story published in 2008. I was tearing my hair out over my choice of characters – especially the protagonist – and the novel’s voice. I was working (or at least trying to work) in the third person omniscient. But I just couldn’t articulate the character’s awareness or thoughts.

With Franzen’s words ringing in my ears, I went to press delete. Let’s face it, if one of the living novelists I most admired felt he couldn’t do it, I should probably give up. But friends and family urged me to sit tight. So I walked away for a year to write another narrative non-fiction book, Canberra, part of Pip McGuinness’s wonderful New South city series, instead.

During this time I had reason to delve more deeply into one of the two cities where my backburner novel would have been set. I walked and I walked, I dug through the archives, listened to a thousand stories about Canberra – that stage for national debate, machination, intrigue and domestic life – and I thought “maybe if I just ...”.

“There is no room for the novelist to exercise imagination.” The words echoed until I decided that, most respectfully, I disagreed with Franzen. In late 2012 I re-exercised my imagination. On politics. I took up the novel again.

Coming at it anew, there felt like quite a bit to work with. Having witnessed the generational fracturing of my own family because of the 1955 Labor party split (it was a source of simmering tension in my parents’ marriage for 50 years), I was ever cognisant of the range of emotion and action – from benevolent public service to astounding treachery – that politics could inspire.

Working around politics for more than a decade I saw it firsthand: gob-smacking leadership bastardry; nervous breakdowns; suicide; venality, greed and treachery; filthy character assassination; crushing loneliness and depression. And that’s before we even get to the political lifestyle (something like co-ed boarding school with alcohol); the vested political interests of big business; the fear-averse blanding-out of complex, interesting political leaders by timid party machines; the 24-hour news cycle; the obsession with polling and message; the dominance of the national security and immigration debate; and the reduction of complicated policy initiatives to empty slogans.

There were the much outweighed positives, too: the unrecognised acts of kindness and compassion; the many fine, uplifting speeches that go unreported because they do not fit the pugilistic tenor of question time; the fine people who really do get into politics to make a difference; and the families who make it work because of their belief in the nobility of public service. All these seemed fairly inspirational building blocks for a novel. So I sidelined my original protagonist on whom I’d based that short story and promoted another figure peripheral in my imagination.

Welcome aboard Danny Slattery. He is a paranoid, abrasive class warrior and former sporting hero who leads a party with which he’s fallen desperately out of love. It’s mutual. Slattery’s life is a shambles. Both his wife and his lover are one foot out the door. He’s at war with his own party. His reckless, violent youth is about to catch up with him. His best mate, a priest, is advising him to lie to keep his job, the media is stitching him up from every angle, and he’s trying to take an ideological stand against the draconian, unnecessary anti-terrorism legislation of his terrified party.

On public policy and ideology, Slattery may be principled to a fault. But he may also just be insane. The caffeine and the sleeplessness don’t help. Nor do the hard grog and the cocaine.

I had my character. I then swapped the third for the first person and from 9am until 5pm most days for a year, I became Slattery (minus the marching powder and most of the booze). He lived in my head. Or I lived in his. I spoke to people in the know about how he might feel at certain points – like when his kids get shit at school because of him; when his wife threatens to leave on the day of a looming leadership challenge; of not being able to get it up because he’s so crippled by paranoia.

He exhausted me. He thrilled me. He disappointed me. He infuriated and worried me. He constantly drove me to think “what if?” And he tired me out. So, Jonathan Franzen, not such a bastard after all. Thanks to his speech, I took the breather I needed to deal with Danny as he jumped from my imagination and into my novel. And I hope that’s where he lives now.

• Paul Daley’s Challenge is published by MUP – Guardian readers can get 25% off the RRP of $29.99 using the promo code CHALLENGE25 at mup.com.au