Alan Moore's BBC Maestro guide to being an author

[Mister Six]

Didn't know the BBC was doing its own version of the Masterclass app, but here we are! For 90 quid, Alan Moore will tell YOU (via the medium of internet video) how to write.

Interesting sideline for the Beeb, and interesting that Moore signed up. I know he likes to hear himself speak (as he himself admits), but I wonder if it was an attempt to help out the BBC as it faces yet more Tory fuckery. I don't think he's hard up for cash, even if he's not taking Hollywood money any more.

Anyway. 90 quid. That's a lot, isn't it? Other Maestros include Marco Pierre White, David Williams and, er, Gary Barlow apparently.

[Magnum Valentino]

Saw this earlier too and am really tempted.

[Ignatius_S]

With regards to price, personally, I would say £80 for six hours is pretty cheap for this kind of thing - Masters of Photography have great courses, for instance, and the standard price is £130 for the full ones. It can work out more per hour than this deal. (Masterclass' business model is essentially trying to lock you in a subscription deal, which I think isn't that outrageous as long as you're making use of it but you have to be comfortable with that lock-in. That said, with all of of these type of courses, there's a risk of the service ending.

[Magnum Valentino]

Wonder can the video files can be ripped with getiplayer?

[Midas]

the barlow trailer feels like a pisstake. also laughing at myself for bizarrely assuming he'd be teaching winemaking.

[Keebleman]

£80 for one course???  Go to Wondrium.  I pay £27 per quarter for their entire library!

[imitationleather]

Just go to university and never earn enough to start paying your loan back!

[thenoise]

Just go to university and never earn enough to start paying your loan back!

Or do a Corrigan and just wander into lectures and seminars. Most likely nobody will notice, and if they do, they won't bother questioning you.
There are also huge numbers of full university lectures on YouTube, although you have to cope with insightful and intelligent questions from the students being met by lecturers looking bewildered and then saying "it won't be in the exam".

It amazes me how much a few online videos is supposed to cost. Wouldn't it be a better business model to charge half as much and sell three times more? Is bandwidth really that expensive?

[Magnum Valentino]

Got the Peter "Dragons Den" Jones one on a gift card (!) and Auntie have said they'll let me swap it for an interesting one, so I'll report back if this is any cop.

[imitationleather]

Wouldn't it be a better business model to charge half as much and sell three times more? Is bandwidth really that expensive?

They've probably decided that charging a premium makes people think it's likely to be higher quality and more worthy of their cash. Also no doubt done market research asking people if they'd be prepared to pay for this sort of thing, and if so how much. Probably most people will never pay anything for this sort of thing, but those who will are up for fronting a lot.

[Sebastian Cobb]

There's some intriguing clips of him cropping up on the BBC Maestro youtube channel now.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BBCMaestro/videos

I'm not a writer but what he's saying seems more like entertainment than anything groundbreaking about writing.

[grainger]

Why have they put him in a cavernous room lit by candleabra, and sitting on a wooden throne? Is this because Moore is a "genre" author?

[bgmnts]

Why have they put him in a cavernous room lit by candleabra, and sitting on a wooden throne? Is this because Moore is a "genre" author?

I think it's because he is basically a wizard who sounds like how a 12th century Northamptonshire baron would sound.

[QDRPHNC]

I love Alan Moore and I'm sure it's very interesting to hear him talk about things, but I'm skeptical that anything creative (beyond the basic techniques of the craft) can actually be successfully taught.

If you goal is to write Marvel movies, then sure. There's plenty to learn about how to structure, when to use humour, how and when to make an audience feel one way or the other.

But for anything more personal than that, I don't know.

[Magnum Valentino]

I love Alan Moore and I'm sure it's very interesting to hear him talk about things, but I'm skeptical that anything creative (beyond the basic techniques of the craft) can actually be successfully taught.

If you goal is to write Marvel movies, then sure. There's plenty to learn about how to structure, when to use humour, how and when to make an audience feel one way or the other.

But for anything more personal than that, I don't know.

Bollocks! (respectfully). Creative talent may be innate, but it can also be latent. The tools taught on courses like this and across countless books can absolutely make it easier to think in a way that's more conducive to artistic expression. It's like lifting weights. You learn to lift weights so you can lift weights, but if you find yourself where you need to lift something heavy off of your mum or something, you're equipped.

(It's not really like that is it?)

But I stand over my defense of this sort of thing. I'm my only evidence, I've always had creative ambition but occasional engagement with this type of thing always ends up helping me with not only craft but also ways of finding (perhaps recognizing is a better word) completely unique and personal viewpoints to mould into something else when I can be bothered.

I really do mean that "bollocks!" respectfully by the way :-)

[QDRPHNC]

No worries, I understand. I just don't want you to think I'm being snob - I don't think talent is innate, I just think some people are more predisposed to follow their muse. As a longtime creative professional, I know from experience that the difference between bad work and good work is mostly down to experience and the willingness to grind through the hard parts, and most of it is hard parts, with occasional moments of insight and inspiration, it's like a fruit machine that pays out just enough to keep you coming back.

I guess for me it comes down to, Alan Moore can teach you how to write maybe, but can he teach you have something worthwhile to say? I think that last part is the hardest and has to come from within, from engagement with the world and the way you process it.

[Mister Six]

Sorry, you do come off as a snob. That argument could be used to argue against all creative teaching ever. Why bother to learn to play a guitar if you won't be the next Jimi Hendrix? Why bother to learn to paint if you're not going to be the next Caravaggio?

Encouraging all creativity is a good thing. If someone is only capable of making "a Marvel movie" (and I would point to Black Panther as a Marvel script with thematic depth and No Way Home as a Marvel script that is technically brilliant in a way that required considerable creativity, so that's not even a particularly good insult) then fuck it - they can create a Marvel movie. Engaging in process of creation is more important than what you actually create.

[QDRPHNC]

No, I'm saying do learn to play the guitar, do learn to paint, do learn the craft and create, if that's what you want to do. I agree with you, creative expression is of the utmost importance and I think everyone should have some kind of outlet.

I also didn't knock Marvel movies, I couldn't write one.

[Midas]

Now that you mention it, the Marvel films are a bit shite.

[QDRPHNC]

Yeah, I mean I can't stand most of them, but I know I couldn't write one.

[Midas]

You should check out this book called "Save The Cat!® The Only Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need!"

Bought a copy when I was at university and now I'm strolling around Beverly Hills, U-S-A!

[Ferris]

Alan Moore can teach you how to write maybe, but can he teach you have something worthwhile to say?

There's a lot in this, and it's my reason for being a bit cynical about writing classes. You can tell me to avoid split infinitives, but can you give me something intelligently proprietary and unique to write?

Difference between format and content I suppose.

[QDRPHNC]

I don't think it's contentious to say that the best art - like Alan Moore's for instance - gives you some insight into something that you never had before. I can't remember who said it, but I remember reading a quote about poetry that went, "A good poem makes you think 'I've never thought of it that way before, but that's exactly how it is.'"

And achieving that (assuming that's what you want to achieve - and if you don't that's good too) is really the hard part. That's the part that I don't really think can be taught. And I think there's a danger with these Masterclass type things, that they present themselves as a bit of a shortcut. You know, 'if I pay $100 for this, by the end of I'll be writing like Alan Moore'. But you won't though. Alan Moore writes like Alan Moore because he's read ten thousand books I've never even heard of, thinks more deeply about his subjects that most people could tolerate, and generally has a very eccentric approach to life, which becomes his approach to his art.

Anyway. For the record, I'm one of those people who just wanted to create and started doing it, I don't have any formal training at all.

[Midas]

I don't think it's contentious to say that the best art - like Alan Moore's for instance - gives you some insight into something that you never had before.

[Midas]

I do share some scepticism of writing courses (generally) as they infamously have a history of attracting grifters, who claim to know a "secret formula" that can be exploited to produce a masterpiece in minutes, but from what little I've seen I don't think this course is of that ilk really. It mostly seems to be Moore discussing his thought processes behind aspects of his writing whilst encouraging the viewer to come up with their own ideas.

It is ludicrously expensive though.

[Midas]

As an aside...



...the new book cover's quite nice btw.

[QDRPHNC]

Oooh I hadn't even heard about this, cheers. Glad he's going back to something closer to Voice of the Fire. Parts of Jerusalem were absolutely stunning, but sometimes it felt like a hard slog to get to them.

[Mister Six]

Yeah, he's brilliant at short stories. I do think Jerusalem would have made two very good separate books if Moore could bear to lose some of the chaff, but it's obvious that the project got away from him, and I'm sure that by the end of the 10-year writing process, he just wanted the fucking thing out the door as fast as possible.

And I think there's a danger with these Masterclass subscriptions, that they present themselves as a bit of a shortcut. You know, 'if I pay $100 for this, by the end of I'll be writing like Alan Moore'.

Well, do people think "I'll be writing like Alan Moore," or "I'll be writing, like Alan Moore"? It never occurred to me that they would think the former, but I suppose that must happen.

Mrs Six got me one of those Masterclass things, and they're highly variable, but there are nuggets in all the classes I listened to. The David Lynch one was the worst, because Lynch is a bona fide genius, and it's like taking a drawing class from Leonardo Da Vinci. "Just look at the bird and draw how its wings move." Yeah, cheers Leo.

Moore is a bona fide genius too, but for all his "I'm a wizard" woo-woo, he's very grounded, so I can believe he'll have something useful to offer. And being a proper working class lad made good, he'll probably come at it from a different angle to his middle- and upper-class writer peers.

The best Masterclass, if anyone's wondering, is the Neil Gaiman one, probably because he actually does teach at some uni or other, so his classes do have lesson plans and exercises to perform, unlike (say) David Mamet's, in which you get some useful tips buried under a lot of vague flim-flam, quips and disordered thinking.

[13 schoolyards]

I found David Mamet's (quite short) book on directing film - titled On Directing Film, thanks Dave - to be a really useful guide. "What exactly do you want to say and what is the best possible way of saying it as simply and directly as possible" is the kind of thing that it's always handy to keep in mind.

My view for what it's worth of writing courses is that they can be very handy to put you on the right track but that writing is a massive task that requires layers and layers of knowledge hammered into you until you can do large chunks of it almost unthinkingly. Unless you are either naturally talented or have been (consciously or unconsciously) working on it for years and years, you're possibly not going to be all that good at it even after taking some classes.

I don't doubt that writing can be taught and people can come out of classes doing professional level work, but from what I've seen learning how to write at a decent level is a much bigger job than most people initially realise. Even hacks churning out the kind of basic but best-selling guff most people readily dismiss are almost always either people who've loved reading and been telling stories since childhood or are professional full-time writers who've cynically chosen to go after the money.

I'm interested in what Moore has to say about writing, but that's mostly because I'm interested in Moore's writing.

[QDRPHNC]

I'm interested in what Moore has to say about writing, but that's mostly because I'm interested in Moore's writing.

Yes, you put it far better than I did. Yeah, same for me. I like just hearing him talk, for the most part.

I was going to write a whole bunch more, but don't want to derail the thread further.