Mick Sylvestre asked Alan Moore:

What have you experienced in real life that has spilled into your writing?

Alan Moore Just about everything I’ve ever experienced has spilled into my writing, but if you wanted a straightforward and obvious example, there was the death of my mother that formed the central inspiration for The Birth Caul. Less remarked upon but perhaps at least as interesting are those occasions where things from my fiction have seemed to spill into my life...the most innocuous example being the sinister clown figure who we had planned to have haunting Northampton in a spin-off from the Jimmy’s End/Showpieces films. I returned home from a week’s holiday a couple of years ago to find that a very similarly dressed sinister clown had become a minor internet phenomenon after first manifesting and being photographed by the post-box around thirty yards from my front door. Life and fiction do certainly have a relationship, but it’s as well to remember that this relationship is being conducted in a two-way street. Often my own, as it turns out.

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