Peter Murphy is a senior writer for Dublin's Hot Press, and has contributed to Rolling Stone and Music Week. He is also a regular guest on RTE's arts review show The View, and has contributed liner notes to the forthcoming remastered edition of the Anthology of American Folk Music. He lives in Dublin.

Mark Thwaite: What first gave you the idea for writing John the Revelator?

Peter Murphy: The title. I saw it on the back of the Anthology of American Folk Music about ten years ago. The Blind Willie Johnson recording is an amazing piece of music, really raw and guttural and holy-sounding. It became a sort of talisman.

Mark Thwaite: How long did it take to write your novel?

Peter Murphy: About three years. But that was after many more years of trying to learn how to write fiction. I wrote a rambling spew of a novel called The Passenger, after the Iggy song, when I was about 25, and never read it. After five years as a journalist I wrote another one called Scalder, which was a sort of rural noir-ish cross between Mississippi Burning and The Wicker Man. Nothing came of that, but a few sections survived and provided the DNA for J the R.

Mark Thwaite: This is your debut -- tell us a little bit about how John the Revelator came to get published, Peter.

Peter Murphy: I signed with my agent Marianne Gunn O'Connor back in 2002. She and her assistant Pat Lynch were very patient and supportive while I tried to dig down and get to the heart of the book. When Marianne read the finished draft, she suspected Angus Cargill at Faber would be the perfect editor. And he got it, from the start. He told me that as he was reading the manuscript, he was listening to Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour, and Bob played Blind Willie's version of the title song. End of story.

Mark Thwaite:John Devine is a compelling central character -- how did you go about creating him?

Peter Murphy: I think the embryo of his character grew inside the womb of the environment I wanted to explore in the language. The sense of place came first, then the voice began to develop. At one point my friend Jane suggested I listen to the voiceovers in Terence Malick's films Badlands and Days Of Heaven. That was helpful in terms of finding the right narrative tone.

I like that phrase "apostolic fiction". The gospels are narrated by scribes who don't really enter the story until the final act, if at all. John is a watcher. At first his function is to bear witness to his mother's life, and then his friend Jamey's, but as the story unfolds, he becomes more of a participant, changes from passive to active. Not a big transformation in the grand scheme of things, but it's huge for him. I suppose J the R is kind of an inverted version of the mythic rite of passage tale. Instead of the archetypal call-to-adventure, a boy leaving the tribe to go out into the wilderness and prove himself, John attains manhood by staying to watch over his mother. A less glamorous version of the hero saga maybe, but a trial by fire nonetheless.

Mark Thwaite: John the Revelator is, on one level, about escaping a small town -- is that theme close to your own heart?

Peter Murphy: It was when I was a teenager, but the act of writing the book was more about returning to the spawning ground in my imagination. The story was written while I lived in Dublin. The location is very loosely based on the villages near where I grew up in Enniscorthy, but it's an imaginary world, a retrospective, impressionistic view of the terrain of childhood rather than literal description. The book is probably as much about the natural world as the social one. In school we learned poems by Wordsworth and Hopkins, who intuited the divine in the pastoral. I was more interested in the malign aspects of nature, treacherous bogs and dead trees and scavengers and parasites.

Mark Thwaite: What was the most difficult aspect of writing your book?

Peter Murphy: Figuring out which book wanted to be written. In other words, finding the story. The tale couldn't really begin until the characters started to grow and assert themselves and act of their own accord, independent of any plans I might have had for them.

Mark Thwaite: How did you overcome it?

Peter Murphy: I made friends with three other writers in early 2005, and over the next two years we met up regularly to go over each other's stories. It forced me to take the work out of the cellar and into the daylight. Life-changing stuff.

Mark Thwaite: How do you write? Longhand or directly onto a computer, straight off or with lots and lots of editing?

Peter Murphy: Spew onto the screen, shape, edit, printout, make notes, cut, rework, insert, reshape, printout again, make more notes, re-insert, re-cut, repeat, ad lib to fade. I'd love to eventually get back to longhand. A cramp in the hand sharpens the mind.

Mark Thwaite: Did you know how John the Revelator would end when you began writing it, or was writing a voyage of discovery for you?

Peter Murphy: I had no idea it would become the book it eventually became. Earlier drafts were more apocalyptic. The oldest section, the End of the World dream, was written soon after I'd first heard Godspeed You Black Emperor. There's probably a bit of Bowie's Five Years in there too. But with every draft, that aspect of the book receded, and eventually the apocalypse became something as commonplace as loss or bereavement, which we all have to deal with. I did suspect the story would probably end with a vision that takes place in a liminal space between earth and water, the two primary elements of the book. A lot of J the R happens in dreamtime, because that's where we spend about a third of our lives.

Mark Thwaite: You are a senior writer for Dublin's Hot Press, and you've written for Rolling Stone and Music Week. Tell us a little more about the day job, Peter.

Peter Murphy: I write about music, books and films, and also have the privilege of interviewing musicians, writers and filmmakers. I'm lucky to have a job that feeds into the fiction.

Mark Thwaite: What do you do when you are not writing?

Peter Murphy: Right now, I'm recording sections from the book and scoring them with a musician/engineer friend of mine, a hybrid of spoken word and music. I played drums in bands for about eight years after leaving school, and gave it up to be a writer. It's good to be involved in music again, but from a completely different perspective.

Mark Thwaite: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

Peter Murphy: I usually imagine certain friends of mine peering over my shoulder as I write.

Mark Thwaite: What are you working on now?

Peter Murphy: Another novel. Something to do with a river.

Mark Thwaite: Who is your favourite writer?

Peter Murphy: Today, Flannery O'Connor.

Mark Thwaite: What is/are your favourite book(s)?

Peter Murphy: Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb.

Mark Thwaite: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer?

Peter Murphy: Stephen King once wrote that even the Great Wall of China was built one brick at a time, and you can see that motherfu**er from space.

Mark Thwaite: Anything else you would like to say?

Peter Murphy: In the eye of eternity we're all already dead, so nothing matters, so we can write the truth without fear of reprisal.