Excerpt from the fantastic interview entitled "The Craft", conducted in two part by Daniel Whiston in 2002 and published on the Engine Comics website. It is now available
HERE.
Daniel Whiston: [...]
A couple of creative people, one a musician, the other a writer – Steven King and Shane MacGowan – have both made very similar comments about the fact that they discover what they do rather than create it from within themselves, necessarily. I think Stephen King's talked about writing as archaeology, finding things together and dusting them down, Shane MacGowan's talked about: “songs are floating in the air, and it's my duty to grab them before some cunt like Paul Simon does”.
Alan Moore: Ha-ha, good point Shane. R.A. Lafferty, when I asked him: “Where do you get ideas from?”, and he said: “Ideas are like pumpkins, they just float through the air, and hit people on the head”. It's a similar idea. I've noticed – and this is an experiment that perhaps a lot of other writers could try: start writing upon a subject upon which you don't know very much, or about which you have no opinions. Start writing. You will find that you've not got something perfectly planned in your head and you're writing it down, you'll find that the words are forming practically at your fingertips on the keys of the typewriter, the ideas are forming, ideas that you never had before. Juxtapositions are occurring to you. Your mind goes into a very different state. If you actually notice this – you can write certain different types of prose, which can leave your mind in a state every bit as altered, as say psychedelic drugs.
Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception. All of our perceptions are made up of words. You alter the words, you alter the perception, you alter the universe. And if you actually look back you come, as I did, to a point where craft no longer really cuts it, where you want something more than craft. Yes, you know skilful ways of persuading people to your argument or things like that, but that's not good enough. That is when you come up against a point like I did. Where I started to look at the archaic notions of writing. Not writing theory as it is now – let's look at what writing used to be. And of course, if you start looking at it, after a while it's obvious that writing must have had its origins in magic, in that anyone who'd got command of written language, would have had supernatural powers.
