As he would learn from a neurologist as he lay in a bed at Box Hill Hospital, the then 43-year-old father of three had suffered a stroke. He was lucky,  in the sense that it occurred in a part of his brain where a reasonably quick recovery was possible.

Yet not everything would be the same for Deane, a writer by trade and by passion. In part, there was the matter of the book.

In 2011, Deane had taken a call from John Brumby, former Labor treasurer and then premier who was defeated at the 2010 state election. Deane knew Brumby well, having first worked for him in the mid-1990s when Brumby led the Labor opposition to the rampant Kennett government.

Brumby had a request for Deane: would he write a book about 11 years of the Bracks-Brumby government? For Deane, a speechwriter, poet and novelist of considerable acclaim, it was a chance to write his first nonfiction book.

He agreed, and embarked on extensive research and interviews.

That was when the stroke brought him down.

It wasn't a simple matter of picking up where he left off. He stopped and started, did the same again. As he relates it, he was having an existential crisis. "The thing is," he says, "it sounds wanky, but I'm a poet. That's where I come from. When I have trauma, I want to write poetry. I had a trauma. I wanted to write poetry and nothing else."

For two years, this was his state of mind. Every time he sat at his computer, he wrote things he hated, found boring.

Last winter, he went out to dinner at the Builders Arms Hotel in Gertrude Street in Fitzroy with his wife, Kirsten, to celebrate his birthday.

"Usually when my wife and I get away from the kids to have dinner it begins with me confessing something," Deane says. "And I confessed to her that I wanted to give back the money, wanted to give back my advance and didn't want to write the book because I didn't think I could write something that would be good enough."

Instead of sympathy, his wife delivered "a massive kick up the arse".

"Don't be stupid," she told him. "We're not giving the money back. Just write the book. If it's no good, we'll worry about it then. But just write the book."

So Deane set about writing the book. But the words didn't flow. He was coming unstuck by trying to begin it with analysis - "trying to be smart - or trying to appear smart, smarter than I am". He decided to ditch several thousand words.

Instead, he took a much more instinctive approach, beginning with the story of who he was, and how he ended up working for Labor, and how the book had its genesis. It was an inspired decision, for it allowed Deane's storytelling and craft to shine, producing a compelling inside story of Labor in power.

In essence, it tells the story of the Golden Four - Steve Bracks, John Brumby, John Thwaites and Rob Hulls - who would provide the intellectual and political drive and leadership for Labor's longest reign in Victoria. It also charts how Victoria tried to hijack Canberra with a reform agenda.

Catch and Kill: The Politics of Power takes its title from an interview with Bracks. "We were a government that could catch and kill its own," he told Deane.

Yet it is much more than a chronology of events. When Brumby called in 2011, Deane also had to consider whether he could do the story justice, and whether it would be worth reading. He wasn't interested in writing "one of those batshit boring books" that get written about politics, especially state politics.

The second part of the title - "the politics of power" - goes to the heart of what Deane wanted to achieve. As he writes, he was interested in the unholy trinity of political power: winning it, wielding it, losing it.

Deane also told Brumby that he wanted to write a story, not the story.

One of the strengths of the book is that Deane was on the inside, first as a press secretary, then as a speechwriter to Steve Bracks. But he is careful not to overstate his role in events. "I was a handbag to the Premier, really, in a lot of ways," he jokes.

The fact that the book had the Brumby imprimatur also opened doors. Word spread, and people would refer to "the Brumby book". Deane would explain that while Brumby had asked for the book to be written, it wasn't about Brumby.

The interviews were often candid, and helped Deane shape what emerges as a fascinating inside account - much of which deals with the serendipitous coming together of the Golden Four.

Brumby was a former federal MP with a filing cabinet mind and huge work ethic parachuted in to rescue a demoralised Labor facing up to the dominating Jeff Kennett. Hulls was the passionate firebrand former federal MP who would work as Brumby's chief of staff before entering state politics himself. Thwaites, the barrister son of a politics teacher, was a rising star.

And then there was Bracks, a country school teacher with a burning desire to make his mark in politics, combining charisma and emotional intelligence with intellect.

At one level, they were rivals. But the dog-eat-dog nature of politics was often transcended. When Bracks took over the Labor leadership from Brumby, going on to defeat Kennett at the 1999 election, Brumby was not excluded, but included. After a year in power, he would become treasurer, and Bracks would hand over the premiership to him a year after Labor had won its third term.

All four could have been leader, and all four at different times put the collective ahead of their own ambition. "I think that makes them really unusual," says Deane. The four remain close friends.

Deane didn't agree with them all the time, but it is clear he has an affection for them. "The thing for me is that if you are going to go into political harness and work for somebody as a speechwriter or anything, they have to be worth it," he says. "Because it's seven days a week, it's relentless, it impinges on your real life, so there are sacrifices that have to be made. Unless they are worth it, I would never do it."

Yet Deane also sees the flaws and mistakes. "Because the truth is there are egos involved and people make mistakes and every government falls and should fall," he says.

The book provides some genuine surprises. It details how in 1997, the Golden Four would meet secretly at a hotel in the Liberal heartland of Kew - an unlikely setting for a Labor war room - to map out the plan to topple Jeff Kennett. Labor's advertising guru Bill Shannon helped them develop their ideas into a story.

In government, we learn how Brumby wanted to retire in 2006, but was talked out of it by Bracks.

There is also the "screen test" given to Kevin Rudd before his toppling of Kim Beazley as Labor leader. The book says the NSW Right wanted to give Rudd this test before it backed him.

Rudd, then a shadow minister, flew to Melbourne, and spent a day in the studio with Shannon and Labor elder and former state minister, Steve Crabb. The screen test was to see how Rudd could tell his story and perform. He passed.

Deane showed the manuscript to the four. The major criticism that he got from Brumby was that there were too many swear words. Deane insisted they stay, for that's the language of the political tribe, of which he is a member.

The postscript to the book is moving, for it touches upon the author's stroke and mortality, both human and political. It is a personal reflection that ties the story together.

Deane's last interview before his stroke was with former Labor minister Lynne Kosky, conducted while she received treatment for cancer. Kosky died in December last year, living just long enough to congratulate Daniel Andrews on becoming premier.

The lessons, then, are the same for both political power and life: don't waste it.

In 2006 John Howard is in his 10th year as Prime Minister and his controversial Work Choices legislation has been enacted when the Queenslander Labor shadow minister called Kevin Rudd begins to make headlines.

By November 2006, Rudd had joined forces with another unstoppable political force, Julia Gillard, and the focus group that was western Sydney had decided it was time for a change. Both Mark Arbib, general secretary of the NSW branch of the ALP, and Tim Gartrell, national secretary of the ALP, commissioned separate polling research and, according to Paul Kelly in his book Triumph and Demise, came to the same conclusion: the biggest single issue holding back the ALP from beating John Howard was Kim Beazley. He had to go.

All that remained was to get Rudd's story straight. Prepare him, like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, for his close-up. The ALP's then assistant national secretary, David Feeney, was recruited to lend a hand. Feeney called an old friend from his days in Victorian politics, Bill Shannon - the advertising maestro behind Bracks' 1999, 2002 and 2006 campaign wins.

Back in 1997, when Brumby, Bracks, Thwaites and Hulls holed up in a Kew hotel to thrash out the plans to defeat Kennett, Shannon was the one who helped turn those plans into a story that reflected what he calls the collective sentiment of Victorian Labor.

"The world is driven by narrative, and it's not just politics," Shannon says.

"I really placed a lot of emphasis on what we did in those early days with the collective sentiment and the narrative and the story development - even if was only to assist Steve."

What Shannon is getting at is the power of simplicity. Whether it's in a political advertisement or a speech, the temptation with many politicians is to try to say everything and, as a consequence, they say nothing. The most important decisions a politician makes are the ones about what part of their story they can leave unsaid. In short, the hardest part of political communications is having the confidence to say just one thing - and say it plainly. To explain who you are, where you come from and what you want to do, in everyday language rather than jargon.

The NSW Right wanted to give Rudd a screen test before they backed him against Beazley. Feeney and Rudd flew down to Melbourne and spent a day in the studio with Shannon and Steve Crabb, an elder statesman of Labor Unity and a former minister in the Cain and Kirner governments. Shannon says:

"It always seemed a bit sneaky, but we agreed to do it. We spent a day with him filming him and developing his story and I think that was a pretty important point in time for Rudd because we were able to get from him - and he was quite obliging, I've got to say - an emotional connection that I don't think had been there until that particular day ... That was a pretty important session. Those tapes are pretty bloody valuable because it was one of the best-kept secrets. It never got out that there was a piece of campaigning happening to a then shadow minister, to go as far as actually filming to see how he could perform and how he could tell his story."

Arbib must have liked what he saw on those tapes, because, on December 4, 2006, Rudd replaced Beazley as leader of the federal opposition.

Seven weeks later, in January 2007, the ALP released a 91-second advertisement. Rudd, dressed in chinos and a pale blue shirt, stands with an elbow on a fencepost and a hand in his pocket. As he moves from the personal (his family's experience with education) to the political (an Australia-wide education revolution), his friendly tone becomes firmer, more like a leader's. He concludes with a vision for Australia's future as "a strong economy, but one where we don't throw the 'fair go' out the back door".

The advertisement, written by Rudd and building on his work with Shannon, is a lo-fi masterpiece, the campaign equivalent of Nirvana's MTV Unplugged, with the Labor leader looking and sounding like a bookish everyman, someone's nerdy dad. What Shannon did with Rudd - as he had done with Bracks - was perform an act of political alchemy, helping turn naked ambition into narrative gold. Rudd rode to victory on the back of the kernel of a story captured in that 91-second ad, becoming the phenomenon that was 'Kevin '07' followed by the monster that was almost everything after.

This is an edited extract from Catch and Kill: The Politics of Power  by Joel Deane, published by the University of Queensland Press. It will be launched on Monday. rrp $32.95.