Before I was a writer, I’d been a film editor. Not a very good one, and not for long. But a few films included my name on the credits.
I’d worked on some cinema verité documentaries. The director started out with only a rough sketch of a script. The idea was to go out and shoot life, as it happened. Later, in the editing room, you’d find the story in the shots. That’s what I had to do now: go through what I had written and find a structure for all those fragments.
Outside my workroom window the shutters and the roll of silver bubble wrap had been replaced by three glass-paned doors, a lawn-mower with a broken handle, and a clothes dryer that was perfectly good except that the door didn’t shut.
The pram was still there, but it was full of mirror tiles now. At my desk I was making lists.
What I’ve got:
1. The Family Story
2. Sol’s London
3. Lighterman
4. Sydney in 1805
5. Crime & punishment
6. Sol on Hawkesbury
7. Aboriginal people on Hawkesbury
8. Sol after 1826
9. Descriptions of Sol—the portraits.
I named a new document on the computer, Assembly draft 1, and arranged my bits of writing according to the list. Something was not right. I tried another kind of list:
Preliminary outline—Sol’s Story.
1. Which Wiseman was he?
2. Crime & punishment
3. Arrival in Sydney
4. A free man again
5. Bankrupt
6. Land grant
7. The man of property
8. Wife dead.
Another new document, Assembly draft 2, another few weeks of rearranging. As I went, I subdivided some of the pieces, deleted some, rewrote others, and wrote new ones.
Then yet another list called ‘Preliminary outline’ and another new document. Assembly draft 3, Assembly draft 4, Assembly draft 5, Assembly draft 6.
All the lists looked great. But as soon as I tried to make the writing correspond, everything went wrong.
Most of it was boring, that was one problem. Pages and pages of stuff about the assignment system and how important yam daisies were. The order worried me, too. Should I begin in 1788 with Governor Phillip slapping that old man? Or with Wiseman in London?
And there was something about the tone I didn’t like. The ‘memoir’ bits had a jocular feel, like a clergyman visiting a kindergarten. The ‘research’ bits were terrible—where did that awful starchy schoolmarm tone come from? Surely not me?
The main problem, though, was something I was reluctant to face. I was determined to write a book of non-fiction, but the only parts of this ‘assembly’ that were interesting were the ‘flights of fancy’ where I’d created the flesh to put on the bones of research. Where, in a word, I’d written fiction.
The mirror tiles had gone from the pram and the dryer was replaced by two non-working whipper-snippers. What was wrong with this book wasn’t the order of the pieces. It was the writing itself. I could either write a truthful book that would be so dull as to be unreadable, or I could write a made-up book that might be read but not believed.
It had all seemed so wonderfully simple that night in the bush, listening to the wind.