Paul Daley tells how he nearly walked away from his tale set in Canberra after one of his favourite authors came to town preaching against political fiction

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.

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