Last month BBC Maestro announced their latest online course, a Storytelling class taught by legendary comics writer Alan Moore. The six-hour-long course consists of 33 lessons, with Moore sharing things he’s learned over his four decades in the comics industry. Today The Beat is pleased to share an exclusive look at some of the course notes for Lesson 18 of the class, which is focused on creating “extreme characters.”
Here’s how BBC Maestro describes the Alan Moore Storytelling course:
Spanning over 6 hours, Storytelling explores the irresistible idea that writing is for everyone and, as Moore notes, “not just for me and people with my amazing haircut.” Advice on how to read with an analytical eye and develop a unique worldview quickly builds and grows into a sprawling celebration of everything storytelling has to offer. Moore explores last line reveals, how wordplay can spark synapses, both timing and time travel, and the all-important question of who would win in a fight between Hemingway and Baudelaire.
Lesson 18, “Extreme Character,” is described as “How to make fantastical, impossible, detestable, reprehensible characters realistic and relatable.” If there’s anything that sounds like it’s right in the wheelhouse of Alan Moore, the co-creator of seminal graphic novels including Watchmen, V For Vendetta, and From Hell, it’s extreme characters.
In the announcement for the BBC Maestro course, Moore described the various aspects that go into becoming a good storyteller:
“Storytelling, and writing, is not one discipline. It’s thirty or forty separate subjects all in one horrifying collision. You will have to learn about character, stories and landscapes, how to present place and period, how to inspire your imagination and then order it into a coherent plot. These and dozens of other things are what I hope to be teaching you in this course.”
Check out the course notes pages for Lesson 18, “Extreme Character,” below. With a cost of $90, the Alan Moore Storytelling course from BBC Maestro is available now.
