Dear Ishmael Hodges,
I've really enjoyed connecting with you on Substack and encouraging you to keep going with your writing. You've certainly got some talent, and you should give yourself a wide berth to explore how to apply it. With all the writers I work with, I encourage them not to limit themselves to just one genre or one style of writing. When you have some natural writing talent and the drive to learn one form of writing, then learning another is well within your grasp and you should follow where the spirit is guiding you.
[And I’m CCing this correspondence to some of God of the Desert Books’s writers, including Alec Joseph Ott, Jon Bishop, Oren Litwin, Peter Tanous, Fred Tribuzzo, Susan LM Goldberg, Yakubu Dakléshelleng Musa, Marc Friedman, and, of course, Sally Shideler, all of whom I encourage to consider the items in this toolkit for their own creative purposes. I’ll also go ahead and tag Elliot Kessler, Andrew M. Weisse, Matt Pemberton, Gabriel Solomon, Elizabeth Sowden, Chris Yogerst, James Bloodworth, Jason Louv, Meghan Bell, Nathalie Martinek PhD, Howard Lovy, Kylie Ora Lobell, and Nathaniel Roy. These ideas might be useful for you guys, too, in your varied writing endeavors.]
And one that you should definitely explore is fiction. You'd be great at it. As I've already mentioned on Substack Notes, lately I've been doing a huge Alan Moore binge. You read my PTSD post citing how his new book (the second below) had inspired a magical ritual which has resulted in a partial remission of my symptoms.
Of course, that fueled me to really want to engage with more of his work. And now it's about six months later. After having done that, I am even more energized to write fiction than I was before. He's really emerging now as a central creative writing influence.
I've been reading his books specifically to see what I can draw from them for my own projects and process as a writer.
(Editor's Note: “Good Lord, you should also read them just, like … for fun, Dave!”
“Obviously! They are fun!" he bellows back. Okay, then. -SS)
And I've got a nice list now of great ideas that I'm ready to deploy. I invite you to consider some of them yourself as you explore what you could do in this medium. A piece of furniture may appear large and complex to build, but once someone shows us the tools to do it, suddenly it becomes much more manageable to imagine creating.
So here's a guide for some Alan Moore reading and what you might draw from it:
Watchmen
1. Kill the Superheroes and Grow the Fuck Up
So, of course, anyone just starting a dive into Moore's work should start with Watchmen. It is the most successful, well-known "graphic novel" of all time and largely responsible for the boom of the medium in the 1990s. It was so successful that it shaped the entire comics and superhero medium, with Moore later regretting that writers had chosen to imitate his dark, gritty, realistic portrayal of disturbed superheroes. The story begins with a vigilante investigative crime-fighter named Rorschach investigating the murder of another masked hero: the tough, military guy, the Comedian. The story then takes off from there, crafting an epic that retells the 20th century through the conceit that superheroes are real, with such imaginations as how the current president in the story, Richard Nixon, could ask Dr. Manhattan, an omnipotent, god-like hero created by accident, to intervene in the Vietnam war.
The main writer lesson that I take from Watchmen, having read the book many times, having celebrated the film, too, and watched it many times, having written essays about it years ago for FrontPageMag (old articles thankfully no longer online): It kills the superhero genre and superhero comic as a medium.
This is the stuff that we grew up on as children and adolescents, and the truth is that by 30 and 40, it's really time to be over it. People need to grow up. Watchmen is the best superhero story and graphic novel ever made. It’s serious art. I regard it as the graphic novel equivalent of Ulysses, the best novel ever. As writers and artists, we all forever exist in its shadow, and we need to push further.
Watchmen encourages us to move beyond this medium, to see its inherent absurdities and inner contradictions. Once one processes Watchmen, then the superhero world can never look the same again, which is why really, it wasn't. When it comes to superhero comics, the genre is defined by pre- and post-Watchmen.
And we should get post-Watchmen in our mentality. Get Watchmen and study it like a textbook. See its storytelling techniques and the various visual tricks Moore employs. You can see it like a work of art. Just dig in and dissect it - the way Moore himself utilized it to dissect comic superhero archetypes and tropes.
Amidst Moore's Watchmen period, there are other titles he's celebrated for, particularly V for Vendetta (also made into a great film) and the Swamp Thing series (which apparently influenced a film adaptation, too). These are worth exploring, and I will get back to them at some point - I haven't really engaged with them in 20 years - but for now, I've been more focused on wanting to take in the author's more recent work that I haven't seen yet.
The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic
2. Juxtapose Narratives
It's fascinating to compare Watchmen (which came out in 1987) to The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic which came out in 2024 after gestating for more than 20 years. In a sense, it's the similar set of techniques that Moore was developing 30 years ago, but now deployed to much more expansive, cosmic ends.
One of the things that you'll see about Watchmen is that he's got multiple narratives nested into the overall story. There are little side stories that he sprinkles throughout, which then juxtapose with the main narrative in clever ways. He also has this mock nonfiction and prose material breaking up the story, too, which we may be tempted to skip, at least the first time, and you can do that if you feel inclined. It’s not necessary to grasp the overall narrative.
Moon and Serpent does the same thing. It's built as a 1920s-style children's book with activities, how-tos, historical tales, and an ongoing fiction narrative. In a sense, it's actually more like five books that are woven together into one:
"Lives of the great enchanters" - which are a series of one-page biographies of various magical figures
Nonfiction chapters about Kabbalah, Tarot, and glossaries of types of spirits
"Things to Do on a Rainy Day" - prose instructions in various magical practices, written in a simple way for children
"The Soul" - a rich, modernist, Virginia Woolf-style (she even cameos) prose story set in Bloomsbury in the 1920s, with rich illustrations
"The Adventures of Alexander" - a bawdy autobiography of a con artist and magician in the Roman empire who created a fake snake god, one of the inspirations of the book and the serpent of the title.
And then he has different artists illustrate each part. So now that I've read it all once, I have been going back and reading each of the segments as they stand alone, or jumping around and reading certain parts in more depth as they seem relevant. It's not just a book, it's a functioning grimoire.
And all of Moore’s works are like this. He packs them so densely with details and layers of meaning that they demand multiple readings. That’s the mark of great art - that you can return to it again and again only to find new ideas and experiences each time.
3. Magick is Great for Fueling Creativity
Now, I know you're of a more materialist mindset, though mystically open-minded (solidarity on escaping fundamentalism!), so really with this magick and occult and Hermetic stuff that Moore and I both use in our writing and everyday lives, as embarrassing as this is, all it comes down to, really, is that it works. I can't prove this to you or anyone else scientifically. All I can do is point the direction on the map and assure you that it worked for me, so if you start exploring there, you will indeed ultimately find something—and it’s likely to be quite different than my personal discoveries. There is a whole lot out there spiritually.
And one of the most helpful things for us as writers is to tap into the Hod sphere of the Tree of Life. This is where Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing and magic, hangs out, along with similar "trickster deities" deeply skilled in language, since they - well - they ARE language. So if you ever get stuck on your writing, if you just tap into Hod, invoke those spirits. They will come and help you write. It's weird, I know: just reporting that it works. It’s the sphere at the bottom of the left pillar. You just need to call out and sincerely want their help, and these guys (they’re generally guys) will show up.
Illuminations: Stories
4. The Power of the Provocative Prose
So, over the last 10 years, Moore has transitioned away from comics and refocused on prose. In 2016, he dropped this brick of a novel, Jerusalem, clocking in at 1,266 pages, and I have been deeply frightened of it, as I am by all books of this length. I have finally started reading it, but months ago, I found this Illuminations short story collection much more accessible for entering his extraordinary literary world.
And if there are four letters, one word, to describe his prose: LUSH. Oh man, this is literary language to savor. While he can deploy many different writing styles to varying purposes, the standard Moore writing voice in these stories is complex and vivid, so much so that he forces you to slow down your normal reading pace in order to take in the various details that he creates and the swings of metaphors and linguistic jokes.
Reading prose like this so excited me that I actually went inside after taking it in one afternoon, out in my yard with the book and Jasmine, and wrote the beginning of what has now become a novel project for Sally and me. I just conceived of a character and thought that elements of this flowing, stream-of-consciousness writing approach would fit for her. And so it has.
Give yourself the freedom when writing to just let it flow. Don't edit or self-censor as you let that first draft flow out - just let the prose jump and then deal with making sense of it later.
And BTW, tucked into this short story collection is a huge novella (or even a short novel) - “What We Can Know About Thunderman” - which does to the comic book industry and its subsequent fandom industrial complex what Watchmen did to superheroes. It’s just a massive, delightful, immersive satire covering the last 90 years of comics history with characters serving as thinly-veiled depictions of real people.
Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore
A biography by Lance Parkin
OK, now having taken in the Bumper Book and Illuminations, and starting to collect some of the later comics I haven't read yet, and gearing up for Jerusalem, I though it time to finally read Magic Words, this biography of Moore that I've had for years, but not yet started.
Could it give the goods on Moore's methods with his genre-transforming comics, practical grimoire, which I know firsthand does work, and now this electric prose style that excited me so much I had to get back to writing fiction again regularly myself?
Yes, my friend, it does. Here are a bunch of key methods from Moore that I'm using now and would encourage you to investigate, too, for your own fiction:
5. Psychogeography
Stay with me, here! This is apparently a tool that Moore pioneered with From Hell, his series about the Jack the Ripper murders, which was turned into a pretty good Johnny Depp horror movie that, of course, bears little resemblance to the massive epic of a black and white comic book series. I'm going to revisit this one again soon, too.
What Moore did was to hyperfocus on the specific location where the murders took place. He tried to layer in and understand all the little details about Whitechapel: what the stores were, what the streets were like. What was happening there in 1600? How about 1800? What are the currents of stories and the spirits of the specific geographic location? Take in all of those concepts and all of that research, and the stories about the place just emerge.
It's worth noting, too, that he then utilized the same technique, at a more massive scale, with Jerusalem, which is set in his hometown of Northampton, England.
That inspires me to really think seriously about place in storytelling, that setting a story in a specific place and then weaving in a nonfiction understanding of that setting can be tremendously powerful and immersive. (And that is the power and point of research in fiction writing—to have those facts to create an experience that makes the reader lose themselves in the story.) I’m applying this now directly as Sally and I start to research the Mojave desert setting of our story.
6. Interacting with Entities
Moore came out as a magician at 40, openly announcing his occult activity and wizard identity in 1993. He also declared his patron god as Glycon, an obscure snake deity, the one depicted in Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. This is basically the same thing that happens to people when they take a "heroic dose" of mushrooms. The chemicals in their minds change and they can "channel" entities of independent intelligence and personality from some other universe or plane of existence or, well, pick whatever metaphor you want for it. There are ways to do this without psychedelics, they just require more effort.
So you want some stories to write about? You want to end writer's block? There you go. Get in touch with some "holy guardian angel" or "daimon" or whatever cultural label you prefer, and they will tell you what to write. I did this with Thoth, and now he is making me make these silly Ibis-Head People AI images. I'll be busy with that for as long as he wants me doing them, which I suspect will be a long time. A Substack devoted to them will be coming soon.
However, you can do this with all sorts of spirits from across traditions—take you pick at the spiritual buffet and whatever you end up with it’ll inspire writing.
(BTW, I found out recently that there really is an Ancient Egyptian theology believing that one of the stages in the Egyptian afterlife is a "mansion of the ibis-faced people." This is a sort of way-station where recently deceased souls hang out and decide where they want to go next: whether they want to reincarnate or reunify with God, or to explore other dimensions of the spiritual realms. Apparently, the utopian quality that I stumbled onto with the cartoons is what it's actually like there. It's just coming filtered through my own biases about what seems heavenly to me - childhood in the ‘80s and ‘90s - and a timeline that just stops on Dec. 31, 2000.)
7. Ideaspace
So, this concept of Moore's - the idea of essentially using mystical techniques to engage with independent intelligences who can then guide our creative process - this applies in a broader sense. He has this notion of what he calls "ideaspace," which sounds simple in concept, but could, in practice, be profound. I’ll find out as I start using it more.
In "ideaspace," everything that can be imagined to exist, does exist. All characters, concepts, abstractions, fictions, historical imaginations—everything is there in not just the haze of our thoughts, but in literal, physical form.
And we as writers can go there any time we want. We can close our eyes, meditate for a moment and then reach in there and pull out what we need. I'll give an example that’s kind of fun to try:
8. Channeling Characters
Let's apply the previous two concepts in a practical sense with another Moore method. One of the ways that Moore writes some of his characters is essentially by doing a kind of method acting. He lets the character inhabit him. He starts pretending to be the character in real life, to a degree, thinking in their rhythm, getting a natural feel for their mentality and worldview. Then when he settles down to write, he just lets the character be themselves. I’ve found for myself that a key part of executing this is understanding the character’s voice. What is the distinct writing style used to express this character, and how does it differ from your own?
I've started doing that with the story that Sally and I are writing and the character that Illuminations inspired. When I'm writing her, I'm actively "getting into character," even so much as putting on a hoodie, as she is never without one, and turning on music that she would like. I just want to lose myself in the vibe and feeling and personality of this character, and then let her steer the ship with the story, going where she would naturally go, rather than me imposing some bigger point on her.
9. Immersive Research
Part of what makes this last piece successful - and, indeed, storytelling in general - is getting into this headspace and finding the pieces in ideaspace. Try immersing yourself in the research that your story is about. Moore did that with From Hell, just taking in as much Jack the Ripper history and theorizing as possible, and then doing the same thing with subsequent projects.
I try to do this, too, with writing projects - just absolute deep dives. I'll check out a dozen books on a subject from the library. Or a dozen by one particular author. (Right now, I'm at 49 books checked out!)
(Editor's Note: … -SS)
This doesn't have to be done solely in a nonfiction, factual context, either. It works in a creative way, too. When you want to inform a creative project, you read others in the same vein. So just as Moore has inspired this fiction project with Sally, I'm also taking in a lot of Virginia Woolf, since I want to get a bunch of her voice and spirit in the character, as well. (And I’ve doubly reinforced that by setting my ChatGPT to talk in a Woolfian voice all the time in its responses to me so the vibe is sinking in that way, via osmosis.)
And now, as we make this turn into the second act, where things start getting really spooky and creepy, I'm going to start taking in some Shirley Jackson (a Sally favorite) and Raymond Chandler. I want to infuse a really classic, traditional element to this story - these 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s writers, as inspired by Moore, who I find writes in this modernist vein, himself. (Bloomsbury even published Illuminations!)
When you get all these creative influences and their language just flowing through your mind, then eventually it just fills you up and you need to pour it out onto the page.
10. Absurdly Detailed Scripts
Now, this is something Moore is especially known for, and it's worth keeping in mind for how it applies to us.
Moore became known for a distinctive script style for comics in the 1980s and through until his final comic story in 2019 concluding League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He was absurdly detailed, giving artists deep descriptions of everything in each panel, as well as sort of philosophical digressions and deeper explanations of the characters and ideas. These were more like extended letters to the artists than standard scripts. And the artists who worked with him apparently loved it.
So Moore was basically going into ideaspace and writing as way of describing what he saw, like a journalist just recounting a movie of real events he's watching. And his words didn't have to be presented directly to the reader, so he could just bang them out freely, since artists, letterers, and editors would translate them into a finished product.
Well, guess what? We can all fucking do that now. We all have an art studio in our pockets now with ChatGPT. We can all write "scripts" in the same style as Moore, just recounting extreme details and descriptors. We can then feed them into ChatGPT and get the art we want. The more detailed the prompt you give to ChatGPT, the better the results it gives you.
We can all now deploy the comic writing style of Alan Moore on our own.
11. Symmetry in Storytelling
Another great storytelling device that Moore utilizes to memorable effect, and that everyone else should use, too, is symmetry in storytelling. (See if you can spot how I employ it in this piece!)
He ends in a place that reflects the beginning. You'll see this the most in Watchmen with its now-iconic imagery, but it's something Moore employs elsewhere. It's a kind of expression of the Hero's Journey structure: the idea that, to provide closure to the reader, you have to bring them back to where they began - only now, that place has been reinvented via the transformative experience of the story.
12. Writing as a Physical Act: He Fucking Breaks Keyboards!
Here's an aspect of Moore's process that I learned about from the biography. I had no idea of this, and it was fucking shocking as hell.
Apparently Moore is a serious Luddite. As in, when the biography came out in 2013, Moore still did not have an internet connection. He was typing his books and scripts on a typewriter using two fingers, and then FAXING them to his collaborators. He regarded the internet as a “distraction machine.”
A decade later, apparently he still does not have an internet connection (there is no official Alan Moore website or social media or anything), though he will do Zoom appearances and interviews, apparently set up by others. He also now does type on a word processor - however, according to his daughter, there is a problem:
He keeps breaking keyboards!
They can't find some industrial-strength keyboard that can withstand the intense, physical act of typing that is his process.
Yes, for Moore, writing is a genuinely PHYSICAL act. He is hammering away at the keyboard there like a blacksmith at his anvil.
When I read this, I was so taken by it that I went across the street to Walmart and bought myself a cheap, $20 keyboard, with the intent of trying this myself at some point, typing so furiously and intensely that the keyboard could be broken.
I admit, I haven’t really gone that hard on it yet. I am more just getting used to having this keyboard again after years of laptop typing.
(Editor's Note: I want to see it happen. I keep waiting. -SS)
But consider it for your own purposes - the physical act of writing, of using tools that you can hit so hard it doesn't matter if you break them. How does the change of those dynamics in writing then change the product that you create?
Now, I will just note here, too, that I am a bit envious of Moore's no-internet lifestyle. I can't advocate for that, of course—it is totally impractical for a writer not yet established as one of history’s greatest of all time.
But! If any of us reach that point - of being so big that it doesn't become necessary to have an internet presence to promote ourselves - well, it would be very tempting to just disconnect and do that to focus only on writing. I think it makes total sense that he would keep living the writing lifestyle into the 2010s that he apparently had in the 1980s, when he wrote Watchmen and accidentally cast a spell that reinvented the superhero-comics medium.
The Tom Strong Compendium
13. A Path Not Taken: Rediscovering the 1900-1930s Golden Age of Sci-Fi and Fantasy
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Moore sought, in a way, to reinvent the dark superhero realm that had learned the wrong lessons from Watchmen. He helped launch ABC - America's Best Comics. And he wrote all of the titles: Tom Strong, Promethea, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Top 10, Tomorrow Stories (short anthology collections), and then Nemo, a spin-off from League focusing on the daughter of Captain Nemo.
Tom Strong is inspired by 1920s and 1930s adventurers, like Doc Savage and global explorers. Strong is not a "superhero," he's a "science hero." He's strong, tough, and smart, able to invent all manner of technology, but he’s not inherently super-powered. He and his family go on adventures, and the series is fairly episodic and fun in nature, lighthearted and escapist. (Oh, and something fascinating that Moore notes in the video above: this comic emerged in 2000 and it was apparently the first comic to feature an interracial married couple or even a long-term interracial couple! Moore didn’t even realize it when he was doing it, he assumed someone else had surely done it already. Nope!)
League likewise draws on this period, creating a kind of "Justice League" from Victorian novel characters Allan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, Jekyll and Hyde, the Invisible Man, and others. Moore recasts this whole period in comic book-adventure style, but with the sophistication of the period. It was too much for me when I was in my 20s—not as seemingly flashy and exciting as some of his other work—but I'm eager to get back to it and dive in deeper. Since then, Moore has expanded the story to the present day and made its final conclusion his comics swan song.
Tom Strong and the ABC line offer to us as writers an alternative, optimistic vision of what sci-fi and fantasy could look like, before World War II, the Cold War, and the digital revolutions crunched down our hope for a brighter humanity.
I'm going to use Moore's reinventions of this material as an entryway to me reading more of it, myself. I've already started by exploring the Edgar Rice Burroughs “John Carter of Mars” books. I'm serializing one chapter each week here at Heroes of the Desert Books beginning with A Princess of Mars, which is now in the public domain. I'm going to keep exploring the books of the period and see what it inspires in my own writing.
I can't wait to get back to that place. Well, I suppose there's nothing stopping me from going there right now. There's nothing stopping any of us from sitting here, closing our eyes, going into ideaspace, and pulling out stories, characters, and mysteries to present our findings to an unsuspecting public.
Anyway, I hope that this has been somewhat helpful for you as you're considering your writing paths forward. Just start exploring and you'll see all the potential directions. And you don't have to pick one! You can do as many as you want, all at once.
And which one will it be for me next? I've started Jerusalem. I just finished the prelude of the first 40 pages and I’m blown away. This will certainly be something to write about more, too, though likely I'll shift over to Ghosts of the Desert Books to do so instead. It seems to have more of those spooky themes to it than fantasy or sci fi, as would be appropriate for this Substack. But I'll have more Tom Strong and classic adventure writing thoughts for Heroes, too, in the coming months as I continue to fuel my creative tank for these sorts of stories. And at some point I’m just going to strap in and do the 6-hour Alan Moore storytelling course at BBC Maestro too.
What do you think? Do any of these ideas sound like they might help you?
Warmest regards,
David Swindle
This is a gem. Thank you for putting this together. Restacking too so I can share with more people 🖖👾
Sorry brother, started reading last night and just got to finishing it. First of all, I’m incredibly humbled and honored that you would put together something like this as a result of our conversations. It’s a lot to process so I’m going to ruminate on it a bit. I read the whole letter, and I’m going to try to set aside time to watch all the video links over the next couple days. Moore has been sort of on the periphery of my consciousness for a while now, both as a person and an author, someone who’s work I enjoyed but knew I needed to engage with more deeply, and this is certainly a huge boost in that direction. On the practical front, lots of useful stuff here. I don’t write much fiction, but enjoy it and would like to do more. I think because of my neurology or whatever you might call it it doesn’t really come second nature to me at all, and so I’m incredibly grateful for all of this to help me be able to get into that brainspace. Thanks so much, my friend. Sincerely.