Derek Beaven

My books take a long time to write. I like to work over the material a great deal, getting both hands into the keyboard (like Owen in The Icon Painter) and feeling the substance of the language develop and mould as though it were a variety of clay.

I began to write when I was a teenager. I’d ended up at a mixed comprehensive state school in Hertfordshire, UK, and an inspirational teacher there, who’s still a good friend, ran a play-reading group for sixth formers. Once a month we would meet in someone’s house and spend the evening reading one of the fascinating modern plays being produced at that time. A year or so of this, and I knew what I wanted to do with my life.
I concentrated for a number of years on poetry and plays. It wasn’t until the invention of the affordable mass market Word Processor that I began to feel more comfortable with the novel writing process. My first machine was a little Amstrad ‘PCW’ with no hard drive; it was all I could afford at the time. The text was green on black, and there was only one font. The little printer was so slow that my first novel took a week to print out.
Nevertheless, the device made it possible to work in the way I needed, and it revolutionised my life. Fifteen years and several computers later I had four very well-received novels under my belt. But the times were changing. I realised that before my next project I’d have to make a choice: to write the book I could already feel growing inside me, or to write something much more ‘market friendly’. I chose to follow my intuition, well aware of the financial risks it ran.

Even allowing for my very slow technique of working, The Icon Painter surprised me, demanding a prodigious eight years. It wasn’t for want of application: the work was ‘full on’, only excepting the time I then had to take out for my part time job. Quite why the book claimed so many hours, I don’t know. I kept apologising to my agent; but, in the end, I just had to resign myself to the fact that each novel has its own rhythm.
During those eight years, however, the publishing landscape changed even further. At the centre of it all came the financial crash, and one consequence was that the trade’s appetite for so-called ‘literary’ fiction, already severely diminished, withered to near zero. Yet the interesting thing about The Icon Painter’s long gestation was that electronic publishing became available—quite unexpectedly—in the meantime. That rewrote all the rules. And it gave me the chance to publish the book I wanted to. Now I very much like the sense of control the new environment provides for the writer, and I look forward to publishing more material—both novels and poetry—very soon.