About Ideas

Excerpt from a really interesting interview published in 2018 on InsideTheRift.net.

The complete interview is available HERE.

Prox: [...] could you tell us about some ideas and themes you have been wanting to explore throughout your career that you haven’t been able to yet?

Alan Moore: [...] As to any ideas that I haven’t had a chance to express yet…no, that isn’t really how it works, or at least not for me. That seems to imply that creators are somehow female in their mental biology, and that ideas are like ova: one is born with all the eggs or ideas that one will ever deploy, and you’d best hope that you live long enough to realise them all. In reality, this isn’t the process. While odd fragments – a character’s name here, a brief scene there – might linger in the mind and be useful as material for some new endeavour, in practice it will always be the ideas that are newest and freshest to you that will provide the energy and inspiration for your best work. This plays into a common assumption that people often make about the act of writing: they assume, not unreasonably, that a writer will first have an idea, and then they will write it down. What actually happens is that most ideas are engendered, mysteriously, in the act of writing itself. So, no, any ideas that I’ve had that were worthwhile have been taken care of somewhere in my extensive bibliography. Sooner or later a new idea will slowly coalesce and will be immediately incorporated into whatever seems to be the most suitable vehicle at that time. I’ve recently considered, for example, that it might be interesting to engage more seriously with poetry, although the content of that poetry is something that I’ll only recognise when I’m actually sitting down with the intention of writing a poem. Premeditated ideas that have been idling around the brain for years will probably turn out to be stale and useless. After all, if they’d really been that good, how would you have been able to resist using them sooner?

Complete interview HERE.