Writing Routines: Agatha Christie

Brandi L. Holder

I have been stuck in a serious rut with my writing lately. I love my daily activity of starting my day reading, but other than that I have no particular routine for completing my work. So I decided to research the routines of famous writers in an effort to shake things up.

I believe decision fatigue is a real thing so instead of spending hours trying to find a starting place I found this list and started at the top with Agatha Christie (1890-1976).
Despite writing 66 novels, 14 short story collections, and becoming the best-selling novelist of all time she still didn’t consider herself a writer, (early in her career anyway) instead, listing her occupation as “married lady.” What. The. Actual. Hell?!

There is no known routine that Christie followed. What I gathered from various sources is that since she did not see herself as a writer, it was…

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The Heart of the Matter …

Routine Matters

The Heart of the Matter …

Bernard Malamud 1914-1986

The highly successful American author Bernard Malamud was well aware that self-disipline and effective use of  time  were central to his craft.

There are enormously talented people around but the problem is getting organized to use your talents. A lot of people lose it, they just lose it. Life starts turning somersaults over your back and the next thing you know you’re confronting things that seem to you more important than getting organized to do your writing. And if you can’t get organized, then you can kiss your talent goodbye. It happens in so many cases, it’s almost a loss, as though you have a field of flowers and were never able to collect them. 

(Bernard Malamud, interviewed by Mary Long. Mademoiselle. August 1976)

 

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My Sunday Poem … # 25

Hello. Good morning. This is today’s post from my other blog over at The 1951 Club. 😊

Marion Chesney (M.C.Beaton)

Routine Matters

Marion Chesney (M.C. Beaton)

Marion Chesney is known primarily for the more than 100 historical romance novels she has published under her own name and under several pseudonyms: Helen Crampton, Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, and Charlotte Ward. But with the creation of Constable Hamish Macbeth in 1985 followed by amateur sleuth Agatha Raisin in 1992, she shifted from romances to writing the mystery novels that she is best known for writing under the pseudonym M.C. Beaton.

She lives with husband Harry at a cottage in the Cotswolds and writes in a small office on the top floor. Her writing routine is very simple but incredibly productive –

I crawl out of bed at nine o’clock – well maybe ten –  and write for two hours fortified by a cup of black coffee and cigarettes. You crank up the film in your head, and write what you see there. As an…

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Pamela L. Travers and “The Tale of Beatrix Potter” (Part I)

This is part 1 of a 2-part post about two quite remarkable writers.
A really well written piece.

The Mary Poppins Effect

I have long held that the secret of the successful children’s book is that it is not written for children. … Outside appreciation of any kind is of secondary importance to the true children’s writer. For him the first and ultimate requirement is that the book should please himself. For he is the one for whom the  book is written. With it he puts to sleep his wakeful youth and tells the story of the hidden child within him.Such works are more often than not the results of an imaginative mind playing its light over lonely childhoods. What the child lacked in those tender years the imagination gives back to it. 

Pamela L. Travers 

This is what Pamela L. Travers wrote, under the pen name of Milo Reve, in her review of Beatrix Potter’s biography “The Tale of Beatrix Potter” written by Margaret Lane.  

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Tribute to Tolstoy

Cafe Book Bean

Born today September 9th 1828
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy
(Usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy) was a Russian aristocrat and one of the world’s most preeminent writers. Tolstoy become famous through his epic novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

“We can know only that we know nothing.
And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.” (War and Peace)

Tolstoy’s fictional work includes: dozens of short stories and several novellas such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Family Happiness, and Hadji Murad. He also wrote plays and numerous philosophical essays.

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (Anna Karenina)

Towards the end of his life, Leo Tolstoy became increasingly interested in a version of pacifist Christianity with support for a strand of anarchist Communism. His exposition of pacifism and non-violence had a profound influence…

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My Sunday Poem … #23

The Thing About Writer’s Block

This is a reblog of a post by my brilliant author pal Lucy Brazier, a.k.a. ‘PORTERGIRL’.

Lucy Brazier

Not just the scourge of authors, writers and poets – anyone who has ever sat down in front of a blank page will, at some point, have experienced the phenomenon popularly known as ‘writer’s block’. I have come to an important conclusion about this most maligned of conditions and it is somewhat controversial, probably won’t be popular, but I thought I would share it with you anyway.

It doesn’t actually exist.

The natural flow stops not because of some mystical interference from the literary gods, but rather because something somewhere isn’t quite right, the narrative has gone awry or because something just doesn’t work. When the words dry up for no apparent reason and everything comes to a grinding halt, go back and look at it again. Retrace your steps, find out where you’ve gone wrong, look for the bits that don’t fit. There are all manner of things to…

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My Sunday Poem … # 22

My Sunday Poem … #21

1951 Club

My Sunday Poem … # 21

Some years ago I remember walking along the beach at Brancaster in Norfolk when I chanced upon an old fisherman’s hut. It was long abandoned and the interior open to the elements. It made me think on a time when it would have been new and probably in daily use.

It also coincided with me having recently read a wonderful poem by William Butler Yeats called The Lake Isle of Innisfree. It began:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee loud glade.

I was thus later inspired to write The House of Stones …

I will build myself a house of stones
And dwell there by and by,
Close to the…

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