How YOU can change the world through WRITING with Alan Moore | Meet your Maestro | BBC Maestro

If I am going to tell you how to be a writer, that will probably entail telling you what writing is. And that means telling you where writing comes from. And as far as I understand it, writing evolved from Paleolithic shamanism. And when we look at the development of writing and magic, we begin to see that they're actually the same thing. That all of the artistic effects from painting, but especially to writing, these all of these effects are things that were regarded as magical powers in the ancient world, as supernatural powers. Books and writing are capable of changing the entire world of modifying human consciousness. You are modifying the consciousness of the reader and therefore you are modifying the reality of the reader. Writing will modify the reality and the consciousness of the entire species and also inevitably will mean modifying the consciousness of the writer themselves. You should never think of yourself as purely an entertainer for hire who is lucky to have the work. You should try to remember the tradition that you are becoming part of. You should try to remember that a writer can change the world with their writing. Think of the books that have completely changed human history and see yourself in that light. Because if you are a writer, then the substances that you are handling, the things that you are juggling, you are having an effect upon human history and the entirety of the human future. The most important tool for any writer to possess is going to be the writer herself. You are your own most important instrument. And so you will have to tune that instrument if you want to be um a successful or a satisfying writer. If you wish to develop as a writer, you will have to also develop as a person. The important thing is the understanding that you should have a platform, a moral or political platform from which you can look at the world and hopefully to understand it which will need a certain amount of compassion and empathy whereby you can look at someone who has ideas that are completely foreign to your own and yet perhaps understand why they have them, what the factors were in their background that caused them to have those ideas perhaps to understand that you yourself brought up in slightly different circumstances may have had exactly those ideas. So that is the basis from which you can look at the world without necessarily being judgmental but simply trying to understand it. When you are writing about the world, you will need to have a way of seeing these things. You will also need to develop an aesthetic point of view. What is it that you personally enjoy about say somebody's writing? You will need to analyze that and also to analyze your own writing to see whether you've done the job that you wanted to do or