A Thoroughly Chaotic Writer of Neatly Plotted Stories

Her less-than-refined writerly day began with finding her notebook, which surely she'd left right there. Then, having found a notebook (not the one she'd used yesterday), and staring in stunned amazement at the illegible chicken scratchings therein, she would finally settle down to jab at elusive characters and oil creaky plots. ... Christie's promiscuous note-taking meant that any one novel or play might be distributed over multiple notebooks and many, many years.

I thought I was a chaotic writer but didn't expect the same to be true of such a neat plotter as Agatha Christie!  In Slate magazine Christine Kenneally, a great fan of Christie's work, pours over Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks : Fifty years of Mysteries in the Making. She finds that :

The contents of the notebooks are as multi-dimensional as their Escher-like structure. They include fully worked-out scenes, historical background, lists of character names, rough maps of imaginary places, stage settings, an idle rebus (the numeral three, a crossed-out eye, and a mouse), and plot ideas that will be recognizable to any Christie fan: "Poirot asks to go down to country—finds a house and various fantastic details," "Saves her life several times," "Inquire enquire—both in same letter." What's more, in between ominous scraps like "Stabbed through eye with hatpin" and "influenza depression virus—Stolen? Cabinet Minister?" are grocery lists: "Newspapers, toilet paper, salt, pepper …" There was no clean line between Christie's work life and her family life. She created household ledgers, and scribbled notes to self. ("All away weekend—can we go Thursday Nan.") Even Christie's second husband, the archeologist Sir Max Mallowan, used her notebooks. He jotted down calculations. Christie's daughter Rosalind practiced penmanship, and the whole family kept track of their bridge scores alongside notes like, "Possibilities of poison … cyanide in strawberry … coniine—in capsule?"

Most surprising of all, it seems that Christie did not always know who the killer was when she started writing her crime novels, but allowed herself the space to try out different possibilities. I always thought that an outline of the plot had to come first when writing this particular genre (I know that this is how Elizabeth George works, for example.)

John Curran's book also includes two previously unpublished Poirot stories and sounds like a must-buy for anyone who loves Christie's books.  I'm fascinated by the creative process, love to study writer's notebooks, and will add this to my wishlist.

FreeMind

I'm a great believer in mind mapping and use it for all sorts of things. On the creative writing course I teach at the British Council, I show my participants how to mind map their ideas as a springboard into a piece of writing. (The best book that has been written about clustering is Gabriele Rico's Writing the Natural Way. Her website is here.).

Start with a word (can be quite random) in the centre of the cluster and then map out all the associations you can make with the word. When you have filled up your piece of paper, start writing from any point of the cluster, and you will find you have plenty of ideas.

I've just stumbled across an amazing piece of software called FreeMind which is a great help with this process, and best of all - it's free!

I had been meaning to get started on a piece to submit for MPH's Ke Sana-Sini travel stories collection and today decided to throw my ideas down using Freemind. It worked like a dream. I love the way I can move things around and edit it, and add new ideas to it as they occur to me. It really does free the mind.

You can see how far I've got with it so far if you click up the pic below ... but don't expect to make too much sense of my messy chain of thoughts.


Now kick me if I don't have a decent piece written soon.

Postscript :

Damyanti also blogged about using mind-maps for writing here.

Writing by Voice ... and by Mobile Phone!

Now this idea appeals. Richard Powers in the New York Times reveals that he never puts pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Instead, he snuggles up in bed:

... under the covers with my knees up, my head propped and my three-pound tablet PC — just a shade heavier than a hardcover — resting in my lap, almost forgettable. I speak untethered, without a headset, into the slate’s microphone array. The words appear as fast as I can speak, or they wait out my long pauses. I touch them up with a stylus, scribbling or re-speaking as needed. Whole phrases die and revive, as quickly as I could have hit the backspace. I hear every sentence as it’s made, testing what it will sound like, inside the mind’s ear.

Writing by voice has a long and distinguished past, says Powers:

Blind Milton chanted “Paradise Lost” to his daughters. Of his 159-line “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth said, “I began it upon leaving Tintern ... and concluded ... after a ramble of four or five days. ... Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol.” Wallace Stevens used to compose while walking to work, then dictate the results to his secretary, before proceeding to his official correspondence as vice president of the Hartford insurance company.

Even novelists, working in a form so very written, have needed to write by voice. Stendhal dictated “The Charterhouse of Parma” in seven weeks. An impoverished Dostoyevsky had just six weeks to deliver the manuscript of “The Gambler” or face complete ruin. He hired a stenographer, knocked the book out in four weeks, then married the girl. ...

Dickens reportedly acted out his characters while looking in a mirror. In the final hours of his life, Proust re-dictated the death of Bergotte, supposedly claiming that he now knew what he was talking about. Once, while dictating “Finnegans Wake” to Beckett, Joyce is said to have answered a knock on the door; Beckett dutifully jotted down his “Come in.” Surprised by the transcript, a delighted Joyce let it ride.

Meanwhile, Lisa Katayama reports in Wired (found via Complete Review) that a new thumb-centric generation of Japanese novelists are writing their novels on their mobile phones!

A mobile phone novel typically contains between 200 and 500 pages, with each page containing about 500 Japanese characters. The novels are read on a cell phone screen page by page, the way one would surf the web, and are downloadable for around $10 each. The first mobile phone novel was written six years ago by fiction writer Yoshi, but the trend picked up in the last couple years when high-school girls with no previous publishing experience started posting stories they wrote on community portals for others to download and read on their cell phones.

She profiles Chaco "a twenty-something Pisces from Osaka" who has written five novels in this way, including a best seller. She claims that she can type much faster on her mobile than on a conventional keyboard.

Now while I could see myself dictating my grand opus from my bed like Powers, my big clumsy thumbs make even replying to SMSes frustrating! I might manage a mobile haiku perhaps, but certainly not a novel!

Litt-craft: The Art of Writing Recklessly

It's always those insights into craft, into how a writer works that excites me the most, so please bear with me being a little self-indulgent here. Toby Litt nicely confirmed one of my own prejudices - the enourmous value of writing at speed, producing quantity and letting quality take care of itself.

I'd noticed from the articles and interviews that I'd read on the Internet that Litt frequently confessed to putting himself under time pressure, by for example setting himself the task of writing 100 poems a year while at university; writing "an unpublished novel length thing" in two months at the rate of a thousand words a day while he was staying in Glasgow; aiming to write a short story a week while he was on the UEA Creative Writing MA course (and much of his writing was actually done on the train); and then at the end of his contract teaching TEFL in Prague he found that he had some time before he had to fly home and says "I decided I would write a novel in two weeks and I would write about those two weeks."

"I'd just try to write a lot. ... I thought it would help me to become a better writer generally."

And he found that "When I wrote faster I wrote more interestingly ... this is one of the dirty secrets of modern fiction writing", adding also that it is necessary to write "fast and heedlessly". (He believes that strongly that it is necessary "to make a complete arse of yourself" in the hope that something fresh and original will emerge from the page.

Keroac, one of his great heroes, used always to go with the first draft feeling that it was the truest, Litt said (and I etch this particular quotation on my writer's heart!): "Writing is performed in the same way that improvised music is performed". Of course, he adds, writing year after year, you develop the reflexes and skills that make this improvisation possible.

He says that he tries to give as much energy as possible to the first draft, because you can't put that in later. He revises immediately, but subsequent revisions are just to make small adjustments.

Litt writes onto paper - doesn't use the computer at all. He says that he finds a pen more satisfying, whereas typing is more mechanical. He gets his work typed up as "proofs" which he corrects with a pen. He doesn't like making corrections onto the computer where it's so easy to delete words.

He knows immediately, he says, whether something he has written is going to be material for a short story or a novel. If he has a clear idea of where a piece is headed and he can see the end of it then it is a short story. If he finds there are ideas that are having little battles with each other then it is material for a novel.

Litt is fascinated by how new developments in technology change us and the way we communicate. "There's an ease of communication which almost attacks storytelling," he says. For all that, Litt has enthusiatically embraced several web-based writing projects.