What I’m Enjoying: Alan Moore, Maestro!

If you’re a comic book fan or just a literature aficionado of pretty much any stripe, odds are you know the name Alan Moore. The man single-handedly changed the comic book industry forever in the 1980s, then went on to craft exquisite, magnificent comic book stories for decades. In recent years, he’s been out of the comics game, focused more on novels and films, but no matter where Alan directs his attention, the results are bloody brilliant.

A few years ago, he recorded a roughly six-hour long course on writing for the BBC under the auspices of the BBC Maestro program. I immediately bought the course, and then didn’t watch it.

For three years.

Look, I was busy, OK?

But I recently sat down and started watching the videos. It’s six hours, yes, but chopped up into 33 separate discussions on such matters as Character, Extreme Character (yes!), Place, and so on, with Moore also speaking at length about writing-as-technology, writing-as-magic, and more. I am soenjoying these videos! And I’m a little surprised to find that much of what he enumerates about his philosophy of writing are conclusions I’d arrived at as well. I won’t pretend to be one-tenth the genius Alan Moore is, but it’s nice to know that, for example, he and I have similar solutions to writer’s block. Or that we both think of ourselves as possessing our characters when we write them.

If you’re at all interested in writing — whether as a writer or a reader — check it out. And if you’re a fan of Moore’s, you should really check it out, if only for the anecdotes he tells about Swamp Thing and Watchmen!

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