01 Intro | Alan Moore’s Story Writing Course | Master Storytelling, Comics, & Graphic Novels | – YouTube Dictation Transcript & Vocabulary

1.[Music] when I was first asked to do this BBC Maestro course I I had some misgivings I wasn't sure whether the current generation of aspiring writers really needed to have an opinionated dietro by me inflicted upon them but after thinking about it for a while I thought that possibly during this 40 years or whatever it's been that I've been immersed in this career I've probably learned one or two things that uh might be useful to somebody who was thinking about being a writer at the end of this course when they're walking away from it I would hope that I would have been able to teach them a number of things like the various bedevilments and problems that any writer is going to face I would hope that I would be able to tell you how to perhaps navigate your way around these things and and also how to actually maintain your enthusiasm as a writer your enthusiasm for the job that you do a decision that I made early on was that I refused to be working upon something that I was not interested in I didn't want writing to become a drudge like the job that I was leaving to become a writer that would be no point at all so what I thought was that I should adopt the policy of only working upon things that I was enjoying and was interested in which initially raises a problem because I was also desperate for work and trying to feed a family so navigating those two things was initially a bit difficult I was deciding that I would take any work that was offered to me providing that it was morally and legally acceptable and that even if it was from a field completely outside my interest say something like football I would find a way in which I could make it interesting to myself now that's a bit of work but if you do that you will make sure that every day when you start work it it will be with enthusiasm and interest and that you will have enough of those qualities to take you through a long career without getting tired of it so that today I am just as enthusiastic and excited about the work that I'm doing at the moment as I was when I started my career I should also point out that writing is not a single subject neither is storytelling these are things that are actually a collision of about 30 different things in a horrifying pilot and one of the things that I hope that this course will do for you is to talk about all of the different facets of writing and how to put them all together I be telling you what you need to create characters to create stories to create landscapes I will be talking about the level that you need to be thinking about these things on I will be making suggestions as to how to inspire your imagination how to to write about Place how to write about people how to write about all of the Thousand elements that go to make up a story this is what I hope to be imparting to you now I should also add perhaps a couple of caveats there one of those is that I want you to look at this face I want you to look at all of these carvon wrinkles at these haunted o and I want you to consider that in my experience this is what a human face looks like after 40 Years of writing so that's something to think about and the other thing is that this is not a commercial writing course I am not sure what a commercial writing course is I am not sure what commercial writing is all of my commercial successes were never planned as such they were all remote Outsiders that people liked they liked them because they were well written not because they were catching some current Trend nobody can advise about Trends and the vagaries of public opinion it is best in my experience to simply be a good writer so that is what I will be attempting to instruct you on um I should also say that the distinction between being a published or an unpublished writer is not one that I'm particularly concerned with here my intent is to Simply make you a good writer a better writer a writer that hopefully will then be able to navigate all of those toos and fros those back and forths of public opinion and public taste if you're a good enough writer then you can rise over any problems like that and and what I'm saying is that having done this course that I can't guarantee whether you will be a successful published writer like say Jeffrey Archer or whether you will remain an unpublished loser like William Blake or Emily Dickinson