The Sound of Silence

Alan Moore reveals you the secrets of writing: HERE!

Excerpt from page 52-53 of Alan Moore's BBC Maestro Course Notes 1.0, related to the 25th episode of the series, Words, Music & Performance. Full course: HERE!

Alan Moore: [...] the life of a writer can be a very solitary thing. Unlike some writers, I cannot go and sit in a coffee shop to create. I need complete silence and no interruptions, which leads to a condition of pretty much permanent isolation. In fact, when lockdown started, I thought that if the virus was created in a lab, it would have been by a writer. Lockdown is normal for writers like me.

Never seeing your friends, never going out, hearing from people over the phone intermittently, being in a room on your own in complete silence – this is our existence.

[...] I used to enjoy listening to music when I was a cartoonist but that’s a different thing entirely. Cartooning can be done by some sort of vestigial brain that you have in your wrists. I used to listen to the John Peel show and it wouldn’t affect my cartooning at all. Once you start writing, that all changes.

I realised that I couldn’t listen to anything with lyrics because it would interfere with the words that I was trying to write. I moved on to purely instrumental pieces but was halfway through an album by John McLaughlin when the music was interfering with the rhythms that I was trying to write in. Listening to ambient music lasted a couple of months before I realised that was affecting the atmospheres I was creating. Some of my comic strips from that period feature huge captions focused on the way things sound, all because I was listening to a lot of Brian Eno and Harold Budd.

Eventually I gave in to the silence.

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