Agatha Christie's Writing and Her Craft

ChristieFanForLife

For someone who likes to write and sometimes struggles with the writing process, I wonder about Agatha Christie's writing processes. Now I know about her notebooks which were wonderfully shown to the world in John Curran's 2 volumes of giving us a detailed look at the way her mind worked, but I wonder about her first drafts. When she wrote on her typewriter I'm pretty sure her first drafts weren't always perfect, even when she was in the prime of her career. How many edits did she usually make on her typewritten drafts? Were they a lot, very few? What kind of edits did she make at the request of her publishers? Agatha Christie was a genius at her craft and I know it must have been hard work on those books. But sometimes with a great writer of that calibre we at times feel like she didn't have to go through much strenuous editing or multiple rough drafts. 

Ajisai

ChristieFanForLife said:

For someone who likes to write and sometimes struggles with the writing process, I wonder about Agatha Christie's writing processes. Now I know about her notebooks which were wonderfully shown to the world in John Curran's 2 volumes of giving us a detailed look at the way her mind worked, but I wonder about her first drafts. When she wrote on her typewriter I'm pretty sure her first drafts weren't always perfect, even when she was in the prime of her career. How many edits did she usually make on her typewritten drafts? Were they a lot, very few? What kind of edits did she make at the request of her publishers? Agatha Christie was a genius at her craft and I know it must have been hard work on those books. But sometimes with a great writer of that calibre we at times feel like she didn't have to go through much strenuous editing or multiple rough drafts. 

I'd love to know, too...but all writers work differently (and I used to be one!).  And all of them edit differently.  I need multiple drafts, and there's always something to catch at the last minute.

She was so inventive, so prolific, that maybe she didn't have to struggle.  On the other hand, an equally prolific modern author I'm aware of grinds through countless drafts.

If you find out, let me know!

Griselda

I get the feeling that her editing process might have involved taking out what she considered to be extraneous matter. I reckon she had a piece of paper with the jigsaw of the puzzle mapped out on it, and had recorded what red herring is going to lead us in which direction and when it should be deployed. I can't think of an example now, but I have noticed clues laid which could have been useful to explain the end outcome and not really having been followed up. It makes me think she did write something in about them, but then chopped it out again to get the flow of the novel working, and forgot she hadn't tied up something earlier. I bet she did work at a novel until she thought it had been satisfactorily filled up, but sometimes looked with her mind's eye taking in what she'd meant to write,  instead of what was there to be objectively seen on the page. For instance,  I've recently finished Dead Man's Folly again, and the action with Sally Legge, her husband and the architect, Michael Weyman, gets started and then abandoned as Poirot jumps over to the Etienne de Sousa plotling, and then Poirot comes back and tells SPOILER Alec Legge that he knows he's been mixed up with spies. Ridiculous that he'd deduce that from seeing him rendezvousing with a youth in a turtle print shirt, and it's all too sudden. I think Agatha Christie somehow thought she'd developed this threesome sufficiently, telling their little story interestingly, but didn't see that she needed to write in a middle bit. In Death on the Nile, everyone's little story is complete, and it works beautifully, and, again, sublimely so, because of the interesting narrator, for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

 I also think that Agatha Christie may have sometimes written a note to herself about what effect needs to be created: e.g. for Dead Man's Folly 'Marlene likes to find out secrets about people' and puts down a memo to show this at this point and this point in the novel. When she hasn't edited her novels well enough, as in DMF,  I think she just has a character say, for instance, in this example, 'Oh Marlene likes to show off you know and thinks she knows things' and Christie doesn't write in a sufficient quantity of little scenes where Marlene (for instance) is actually boasting. She is a bit lax in laying down the trails. By contrast, Murder at the Vicarage is simply stuffed with little short and  varied indicative scenes, with all the personalised dialogue to go with them (e.g. the painting in the attic, and the earring) whereas you feel that if the attic incident had occurred in a sketchier book, such as Dead Man's Folly, she would have had a policeman say, 'There's been a slashed up painting found in the Manor House attic, Poirot.' and that would practically be it. In her best work, I think she has edited out the repetition: hardly at all in Death on the Nile. In Dead Man's Folly, there is far too much repetition of characters saying that Hattie is decorative but a bit wanting in the brains department. It just goes nowhere, and she needed to have put in some scenes with SPOILER, Hattie tripping herself up.

GKCfan

***SPOILERS***

One thing I wonder about Death on the Nile is the fact that the clue of the little hole in the table isn't mentioned until Poirot's summation.  It's the only major clue that Christie never provided fair play for, and I think she either planned to mention it but forgot, or the line mentioning the damage to the table was cut in the editing process.

Ajisai

I also have to think Agatha Christie worked with numerous editors, not merely on her own.  Some of what you mention may be their 'fault.'

ChristieFanForLife

When Agatha Christie wrote The Mysterious Affair At Styles she wrote each individual chapter out in longhand, did her editing, then typed a fair copy of it. . .. then when she got bogged down in the middle of the book she went to the country to work it out. But I wonder, did Agatha Christie employ this method throughout her writing career: writing the book in longhand, did her edits, then typed a clean and revised copy on the typewriter? 

Ajisai

Thanks, ChristieFanFL.  That she wrote in longhand is interesting to hear! 

ChristieFanForLife

Ajisai said:

I also have to think Agatha Christie worked with numerous editors, not merely on her own.  Some of what you mention may be their 'fault.'

In her later books, many say that Christie is wordy and tends to ramble and meander here and there. That could have been due to old age or maybe because she dictated her later books on a dictaphone. It could have been both. But nothing was wrong with Christie's imagination and her ability to churn out a plot. Her creative powers were still on point. It's possible that if she didn't use a dictaphone for her later books and used her method of writing in longhand, revising and typing a clean copy on the typewriter as before, then she wouldn't have been so wordy. I must add that she used a dictaphone because she broke her writing wrist and because of that she used it. But she was quoted to have missed the actual writing process. She said, “There is no doubt that the effort involved in typing or writing does help me in keeping to the point. Economy of wording, I think, is particularly necessary in detective stories. You don’t want to hear the same thing rehashed three or four times over. But it is tempting when one is speaking into a dictaphone to say the same thing over and over again in slightly different words. Of course, one can cut it out later, but that is irritating, and destroys the smooth flow which one gets otherwise.” So maybe it wasn't old age that made her write in this way. The dictaphone could have been a role in her "decline" (as many say). And even Agatha Christie realized the negative effect that the use of a dictaphone could bring in writing a story. But it's her editors that play a rather bigger role in how her later books could have looked. They're editors! Their job is to edit and revise. They could have tightened up the sentences and discovered the little inconsistencies. If the readers can see it why couldn't the editors? Or were the editors more pressured and cared more about delivering on time a "Christie for Christmas"? Or did they catch the wordiness and inconsistencies but Agatha Christie didn't want to involve herself in such a massive editing process, finding it as she said in the quote I said earlier "irritating" and again "destroy the smooth flow [of the book]"? 

Ajisai

Again, thanks!  I love hearing about how writers work.  

ChristieFanForLife

Are there any copies available of rough drafts that Agatha Christie wrote out in longhand? I would love to see the differences between the rough draft vs. the clean typed out copy on the typewriter. The notebooks in which she did her plotting and developing are a treasure trove but seeing her rough drafts -- just one-- would be a nice bonus! Just the other night I've seen the first few pages of a rough draft copy of one of my favorite books The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was interesting seeing the cross-outs, pencil erasures, and some sentences written on the draft that turned out to be different from the final draft.