To me, the basic technology is the word, I mean that's not technology, that is a fruit of technology. The clue with technology is the 'logy' bit - technology means writing about a body of knowledge. The word is the mother technology, all technologies are based upon the word, the word is the primal technology. Dealing with language, dealing with being a writer, you're gonna be dealing with language. If it's comics, then that will involve a pictorial element, but a lot of the basic things are the same. If you want to learn how to write, be analytical, and that probably means when you're starting, be reductionist. It's too big a problem to grasp the whole thing at once, at least at the start of your career. Break it down. Start thinking about the different components of a story.
What things should a story have? It should have a plot, although this doesn't have to be the most important thing. The plot is the skeleton. Sometimes a beautiful and elegant plot is what a whole story's about, and that's great, but sometimes a plot need only be a string of events that takes you from point A to point B or D or whatever.
Now, there should also be what the story is about, which is not the same thing as the plot. What the story is about - what are you trying to say? What kind of shape or impression are you hoping to leave upon the reader? In a sense, the story, or poem or verse or whatever it is you're writing, you can kind of think of it as a kind of projectile. Imagine it is a kind of projectile which has been specially shaped to be aerodynamic, and that your target is the soft grey putty of the reader's brain. What kind of shape, what kind of indentation, what kind of lasting scar do you want to leave upon your reader? You design the missile accordingly. What are you trying to convey to them? It's going to be some kind of information. Now that can be factual information, emotional information, psychological information...it's gonna be some sort of information...it might be non-linear, it might be more like noise than information...sort of like James Joyce, because actually it's the noise that holds the most information.
Pure signal is like Janet and John - yes, you can understand everything on the page, but there's nothing much there worth understanding. Noise - or something approaching noise - is like a page of James Joyce, a page of Ian Sinclair - where there is such a density of information that it almost becomes incoherent, but it is full of information. So, it's the ways of getting that information across - plot, the story has to be about something, it has to have a purpose, it has to have a shape. It has to have a structure. If you're going to be really clever, you can maybe get the structure the plot and the theme all to reflect each other in some way - but that's just being clever.
Watchmen was kind of clever - I was going through one of my clever periods - probably emotional insecurity, I thought: "People will laugh at me 'cos I'm doing superhero comics. I'd better make 'em really clever, then no-one will laugh."
Read the rest of Daniel Whiston's extensive interview with Alan Moore here. And if you haven't read Watchmen yet, what's wrong with you? For god's sake do so before the movie comes out.
If you want to read more about the man, see this article in the Telegraph. It's quite good. My favorite words from it:
Alan Moore on...
HIS WORK: "People have asked me why I made the first chapter of my first novel so long, and in an invented English. The only answer I can come up with that satisfies me is, to keep out the scum."
LOVE: "I'd recommend to anybody working on their relationship that they should try embarking on a 16-year elaborate pornography [project] together. I think they'll find it works wonders."
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