In other novels I’d tried different devices to let dialogue be part of the flow of the moment, rather than quarantined from it. I’d tried starting a new line, and I’d tried introducing dialogue with a dash. I’d tried using single quotation marks and no new line. I’d also tried italics.

In the first eight or ten drafts of The Secret River I did nothing more than make sure the dialogue was attached to a ‘he said’ or ‘she said’. But there was always the danger that a reader mightn’t immediately know whether something was dialogue or narrative. It also meant that dialogue could never be more than one sentence long.

Some time in the beginning of 2004, the dialogue went into italics. It solved some problems, but created others. More than a line or so of italics is irritatingly hard to read, so my dialogue had to stay short. And I couldn’t use italics for anything else. This made difficulties if something that was normally italicised—the name of a boat, for instance—occurred in the dialogue.

After having wrestled with the voices of my characters for several years, another truth about writing was beginning to make itself known to me. Not only should you never have a blank page, and not only could you encourage yourself with the reminder that you could fix it up later. You also had to accept that the solution to every problem creates another.

26. THE FIRST READERS

26
The First Readers

It’s no good asking friends and family to read your manuscript. If they say they love it, you don’t believe them. If they have criticisms, it stings. It puts friends in an awkward position if they hate it, and it’s asking a lot of anyone to give up the amount of time it takes to read a manuscript and think about it.

But in the middle of 2004 I laid this burden on several friends and on my husband. They read the manuscript, they made notes, and they talked about it with me.

They all liked the book (or they said they did). They had a list of queries, suggestions, insights. Two Aboriginal readers, Melissa Lucashenko and John Maynard, pointed out in the most tactful way that didgeridoos (described at enthusiastic length) wouldn’t have been seen around Sydney, since originally they were used only by Arnhem Land people.

But they all agreed on one thing: Sal wasn’t working.

They put it in different ways. ‘Sal’s character needs a bit of development.’ ‘Sal needs to be more interesting.’ ‘Beef up Sal a bit.’